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LEE AND HIS CAUSE 



Lee and His Cause 

OR 

The Why and the How of the War 
Between the States 



BY 

JOHN R. PEERING, D. D. 

Chaplain Kentucky Division, U. C. V., Once of Claiborne GuanJs. Co. K. 
12th Regt. Miss. Vol. Inft., Army Northern Virgiiiia, and Later of Cap!. 
Qyirk's Scouts, Morgan's Kentucky Cavalry 



JBflO, verum amo^ verum volo mihi did : Mendacem odi ! 

—Plautus 



New York and Washington 

THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
1907 






LIBRARY of CONi'aNESS 
Two Copies Heceived 

DEC n i907 

yA)opyrl£ht Entry 



<i / /COPY B. 



Copyright. 1907, by 

JOHN R. DEERING 



First Published in December, igoy. 



DEDICATION 

TO 

MY THREE DAUGHTERS 

AND SIX SONS 

Who have been faithfully taught the Truth 
of History, the Nature of our Government, and 
the Love of our Country; in whom I trust to 
transmit these precious things to coming gener- 
ations, as they may have the power, for their 
own sake, and for the honor of those, who at 
home, in council chambers, legislative halls, 
hospital wards, prison cells and on hard-fought 
fields, have taught and toiled, sorrowed and 
suffered, bled and died, to maintain and estab- 
lish them. 



INTRODUCTORY 

The matter here presented to the reader was 
first given as a ''Memorial Day'' Address, 
before Confederate Veteran Camps, and Chap- 
ters of the Daughters of the Confederacy, in 
several cities and towns. Its original use has 
modified its final form ; whilst to embody more 
of historic fact, and so enhance the permanent 
value, its limits have been largely expanded. 

There are many and worthy "Lives of Lee," 
and some excellent "Histories of the United 
States," and still more abundant "Sketches of 
Battles and Minor Engagements," with almost 
innumerable "Narratives of Generals," and of 
"Commands and Campaigns." Many of these 
are large and expensive, too heavy for handling 
and too costly for wide circulation, and their 
readers are correspondingly few and well to do. 
This is quite unlike any of those. We have also 
able and elaborate discussions of the Federal 
Constitution, with their ample deductions learn- 
edly and long drawn out; but little read and 



8 Introduction 

less understood. This is not at all like those. It 
is as simple, I hope, as short, and makes for 
truth as much as it lacks of beauty. 

We have many other books — some of them, 
like the down-easter's razors, ''made to sell," 
and therefore to suit all sorts of readers all the 
world over. I am not concerned that this little 
book shall please everybody. It was made to 
vindicate but one side. The only important 
question is. Does it do so? My ambition is to 
state facts, not to get money. I cheerfully leave 
conclusions to my readers. They may strike, if 
they will but hear me ! 

Q The historical items recorded here are more 
or less involved in the solution of questions 
which have arisen as to the rightfulness of 
secession; the origin and conduct of its cause; 
the character, motives and sentiments of the 
people who espoused and defended it, as well 
as of those who forced them to fields of blood. ] 
I thought to give these facts in form so cheap, 
and style so terse, as to bring them within the 
means and times of our busy men and women. 
I have tried to condense and yet comprehend; 
to be clear, yet not "too dear" for the common 
people's purse. 



Introduction 9 

"History, as written, if accepted in future 
years, will consign the South to infamy," says 
Honorable J. L. M. Curry. The truth, the only 
antidote for the poison of falsehood, should be 
set to work at once, or the evil effects will be- 
come incurable. No time is to be lost. Soon 
the cemetery will hold us all. What shall be 
then thought of our cause and conduct will de- 
pend upon what we leave in the books of our 
era. Books live on. They should not misrepre- 
sent us or our dead. But think of the stream 
pouring from the press, a stream so strong and 
so full of ignorance of us, and of prejudice 
against us — think of the political interests, and 
sectional rivalries, and financial superiority, 
and numerical preponderance, and commercial 
advantages, and the immen'^e Governmental in- 
fluence, all combined upon the successful side — 
will posterity ever know who we were, or why 
we fought? It all depends upon what they 
read. {This book is a soldier's small contribu- 
tion of something reliable and readable. 

It may not be quite needless to say in this 
place (though I certainly came near forgetting 
to say it), that the sentiments expressed in this 
book or justly inferable from it, are such as 



lo Introduction 

befit a Confederate soldier's discussion of war 
times and topics, and might not have been de- 
nied or dissembled without the guilt of insin- 
cerity or hypocrisy, qualities hated of God and 
man. 

To have given for every statement my au- 
thority, and credit for every fact related, to 
every author consulted, would have made very 
unsightly pages, and diverted at most interest- 
ing moments, the reader's attention. ( Due ac- 
knowledgment is made in another place in a 
printed list of "sources," and also by the fre- 
quent use of quotation marks throughout the 
text. 

I wish to close this prefatory note without 
other remark, save a saying that I judge worthy 
in itself, and well suited to my work, from 
the pen of Rev. Thomas E. Bond, M. D., of 
Baltimore. *'Truth for her own sake — without 
calculation of probabilities, or hope of results ; 
Truth, solitary, friendless, impotent, on her 
way out of the world; Truth at the bar of 
Pilate, dead on the Cross, still in the grave — 
Truth, always and everywhere, is the one thing 
to be sought and kept, defended and clung to. 
Whenever you see a lie rampant, hit it; wher- 



Introduction 1 1 

ever a truth down, give a hand to it. There is 
no nobler work in this Hfe than to help the 
Truth/-' 

Jno. R. Deering. 
October 4th, 1907. 

"Dixie/' 

Lexington, 

Kentucky. 



CONTENTS 

Paot 

Introduction „ 7 

Chapter 

I. A Confederate Memorial Address.... 15 

II. That Conflict Was Plainly a People's 

War 38 

III. Upon Our Part, It Was a Justifiable 

War 54 

IV. It Was a Great War 158 

V. It Was a Hopeless War 167 

Sources 182 



I 



A CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL 
ADDRESS 

I BELIEVE THAT, IN THE END, TrUTH WILL CONQUER. 

— Wyclif. 
In 1381 A. D. 

Daughters of the Confederacy, Soldiers, 
Sailors, and Fellow-Citizens : 

It is strange to me that I am here to speak 
to you of Lee and his Cause — the long-lost 
Cause. A still stranger thing is that you are 
here to listen to me. My limitations are so 
limitless ! My disabilities are so distressing ! 
As I am a poor preacher, I must of course 
eschew politics; and I must steer clear of all 
constitutional questions, for I never studied 
law or meddled with statecraft ; and no matter 
what was the Constitution, the Amendments 
13, 14 and 15, have come to pass and are in 
force. Why talk about the one, when th^ 
others "are it?" (I might reply, simply to know 



i6 Lee and His Cause 

the facts.) Nor dare I mention military mat- 
ters, for I am unlearned in the science of war, 
and never practiced the art save as a boy-pri- 
vate on the "far-flung battle line." The field 
of history is posted against me, so they 
say, because it has yet to be written. There 
is no history of the war, for it must be 
written by men unborn, because they weren't 
in it and know by experience nothing of 
it! Our schools are now being filled with 
histories, so called, yet the men who helped 
to make history must not dare to write it. 

The biographical region is also yet closed, 
because it is confidently claimed that, we stand 
too close, we lack the perspective, which pos- 
terity will have, of course, in which to view the 
mighty men of renown, as they should be seen. 
Just why a man who wasn't born for a century 
after Lee had gone to God, will be able to see 
and know and describe him better than the one 
who camped, marched and fought under him, 
does not yet appear to me; but I believe it, of 
course, because I see it so often in the news- 
papers! In sheer despair, I thought of Lee 
himself — it is h'is birthday, and was his cause, 
as much as ours — might I not venture to speak 
of him, but one of our chief captains ? Could I 



Lee and His Cause 17 

not be cautiously critical, or critically cautious, 
modest and moderate, in this solitary instance, 
and for a single hour, whilst I should speak of 
him? Why, yes, but alas for me! *'Only an 
Apelles may paint Alexander;" — and had I the 
skill to do it, where is the time for the task? 
It would take a year to do the work, and a week 
to examine and enjoy it, not an hour. Listen, 
it has already been done. Buy for your winter 
nights, for your college and city libraries, such 
volumes as "General Lee," by Fitzhugh Lee, 
his nephew and cavalry commander, and "Rob- 
ert E. Lee and the Southern Confederacy," by 
Alexander White, M. A., D. D., Ph: D., and 
"Personal Reminiscences of General Lee," by 
J. William Jones, D. D., his chaplain in camp 
and in college; and "Recollections and Letters 
of Lee," by his son Robert, and "Four Years 
Under Marse Robert," by Major Robert Stiles. 
In these you will find worthy work from able 
hands and from ample, original sources, work 
that has already won world-wide fame, and 
recognition of Lee as the greatest captain of 
this country, or era, the idol of his army, and as 
President Davis well said, "The high model 
for the imitation of generations yet unborn." 



1 8 Lee and His Cause 

The Virginia Lees were of early English 
stock. R. E. Lee was born January 19th, 1807, 
in Stratford, Westmoreland County. His father 
was "Light Horse Harry," Washington's Chief 
of Cavalry. His mother was Anne Hill Carter. 
His father dying when he was but eleven, Rob- 
ert was her very own. When he left home for 
the academy, she said of him, "Oh, how can I 
live without Robert, he is both son and daugh- 
ter to me?" He grew up in Alexandria and 
went from there at eighteen to West Point, in 
1825. In a class of forty-six, he graduated sec- 
ond, in 1829, and without a single mark of 
demerit. The young lieutenant was married, 
June 30th, 1 83 1, at Arlington, to the beautiful 
and charming Mary Randolph Custis, great- 
granddaughter of Mrs. George Washington. 
He was then twenty-four, past. Five years 
later, he was in Mexico under General Win- 
field Scott, who said, "My success was largely 
due to the skill, valor and undaunted courage 
of Captain R. E. Lee." Later, General Scott de- 
clared, "Lee is the greatest military genius of 
America, and the best soldier that I ever saw in 
the field." He also said that, "If opportunity 
offers, he will show himself the foremost cap- 
tain of his time." It isn't at all strange, there- 



Lee and His Cause 19 

fore, that Mr. Lincoln, moved by the old com- 
mander's judgment, should have sent Lee, a 
dozen years later, and when he wanted the best 
man among men, through Mr. Francis P. Blair, 
an offer of the command of all the United 
States forces being organized for the invasion 
of Virginia; nor that General Scott considered 
him as worth to the Union cause an army of 
fifty thousand men; nor can any man wonder 
that a few days after, Virginia,, his noble 
mother, put into his hands her sword and gave 
him command of all her troops. 

As he stood in her Convention to accept this 
trust, he was thus described : — "Tall, straight, 
strong, brown-eyed, of gentle and benevolent 
countenance, and of remarkable beauty, of un- 
affected dignity and gravity. In robust health, 
and of almost boundless powers of endurance, a 
perfect and beautiful model of manhood." 
Ladies, I am no artist, but I may hold up a 
sketch that is as hfelike as it is elegant. I do it 
with pleasure, for you will enjoy it immensely. 
It is by the Honorable Ben Hill of Georgia: 
"Lee possessed every trait of other great com- 
manders without their vices. He was a foe 
without hate, a friend without treachery, a sol- 
dier without cruelty and a victim without mur- 



20 Lee and His Cause 

muring. He was a public officer without vices, 
a private citizen without wrong, a neighbor 
without reproach, a Christian without hypoc- 
risy, and a man without guilt. He was Caesar 
without his ambition, Frederick without his 
tyranny. Napoleon without his selfishness, 
Washington without his reward. He was as 
obedient to authority as a servant, and a royal 
in authority as a king. He was as gentle as a 
woman in life, pure and modest as a virgin in 
thought, watchful as a Roman vestal, submis- 
sive to law as Socrates, and grand in battle as 
Achilles !" Such was our hero — ''great in his 
goodness, and good in his greatness," far be- 
yond his fellows. A careful writer says : — 
"Such a character for balance, for charity, for 
affection, for gentleness, for sufficiency, for re- 
straint, for silence, for simple piety, for uncon- 
scious greatness, this world has seldom seen." 

Mr. W. W. Corcoran, of Washington, a 
name honored, and revered wherever big- 
hearted benevolence and the graces of the 
Christian religion are recognized, was invited 
by the Committee in charge of the laying of the 
corner-stone of the Lee monument in Rich- 
mond to be present on that occasion. The ven- 
erable philanthropist, finding that he could not 



Lee and His Cause 21 

accept, wrote the letter quoted below in which 
he thus advisedly speaks of General Lee: 

"It was my good fortune to have been hon- 
ored with the immediate acquaintance and close 
friendship of General Lee during the whole 
period of his public career; and whether I re- 
call him as he moved in the social sphere, which 
he adorned by his virtues and graces, or as he 
towered above his contemporaries on that 
higher stage where the luster of his great qual- 
ities shone in the eyes of the whole civilized 
world, I can truly say, with no small experi- 
ence of my fellow-men, that of all the men I 
ever knew, he always seemed to me the most 
remarkable for the grandeur as well as for the 
symmetry of the elements which composed the 
strength and beauty of his peerless character. 
For such was the natural constitution and such 
the harmonious blending of these elements that, 
in the gentleness and benignity of his de- 
meanor, he was seen to be as great in his good- 
ness as he was good in his greatness. 

"Like all truly great and good men. General 
Lee had in the highest degree that simplicity of 
character which springs from purity of heart 
as well as from the perfect transparency of a 
clear intelligence. Endowed with an under- 



22 Lee and His Cause 

standing which was as calm as it was pene- 
trating and profound, he always possessed his 
soul in a patience which never murmured, and a 
serenity which was never ruffled, whatever 
might be the duties he was summoned to per- 
form, or whatever might be the perils he was 
called to face. 

"No duty ever found him unprepared. No 
trial ever shook his steadfast mind. Intrepid in 
all assaults of fortune, and the very soul of 
honor, he was the Chevalier Bayard of his 
day — a knight without fear and without re- 
proach, because in him all that was soldierly in 
conduct met and mingled with all that was 
blameless in life. With an integrity which 
rooted itself in the very fibre of his moral con- 
stitution, and which, therefore, never gathered 
spot nor stain throughout the whole of his long 
and eventful career, he yet had not the slight- 
est trace of censoriousness in his nature, but 
walked before men with the modesty and hu- 
mility born of a deep religious spirit. 

"It is only those who knew him well in all 
the serene depths of his mental and moral being, 
who can account for the heroism he displayed 
after he had sheathed his sword and bowed, 



Lee and His Cause 23 

without repining, to the decree of an overruHng 
Providence. 

"Although the hfe and example of such a 
man may justly seem to belong, in some special 
sense, to the State and section which stood in 
the clearest sight of all his greatness and all his 
goodness, yet the whole country may rightly 
claim its share in the heritage of that renown 
which all generous minds are quick to accord 
to exalted virtues wherever found, and to mag- 
nanimity of soul wherever it is inspired by a 
conscientious sense of right." 

President Roosevelt, in his life of Thomas 
H. Benton, says : 'The world has never seen 
better soldiers than those who followed Lee, 
and their leader will undoubtedly rank as with- 
out exception the very greatest of all the great 
captains that the English-speaking people have 
ever brought forth ; and this, although the last 
chief of his antagonists may himself claim to 
stand as the full equal of Marlborough and 
Wellington." 

Lord Garnet Wolseley, Commander in Chief 
of the Armies of Great Britain, has said, 
"I have met with many of the great men 
of my time, but Lee alone impressed me 
with the feeling that I was in the presence 



24 Lee and His Cause 

of a man who was cast in a grander mold, and 
made of metal different from, and finer than, 
that of all other men. I believe that all will 
admit that Lee towered far above all men on 
either side in that struggle. I believe Lee will 
be regarded not only as the most prominent 
figure of the Confederacy, but as the greatest 
American of the nineteenth century; whose 
statue is well worthy to stand on an equal ped- 
estal with that of Washington, and whose 
memory is equally worthy to be enshrined in 
the hearts of his countrymen." 

Assuming that it takes a great soldier to 
pronounce a sound judgment upon a soldier's 
greatness, I beg leave to close this series of 
tributes with that of the first Lieutenant- 
General in the Confederate Armies — the man 
most nearly Lee's equal in military genius, 
in -Christian cc^mpleteness, and in the admira- 
tion and affection of the Southern people. 
He said, ''General Lee is a phenomenon. He 
is the only man I would be willing to follow 
blindfold." Such was the estimate of the man 
whom the world calls "Stonewall Jackson." 
If the cold mute marble of Lee's tomb shall 
ever ''speak his matchless worth," then the 
lines inscribed over the dead body of England's 



Lee and His Cause 25 

mighty and illustrious Christian soldier, "Major- 
General Charles George Gordon, who lies in 
London's great cathedral, would sum up as 
truly and express as tersely the virtues of the 
noblest of all Americans — of our peerless Lee — 
''who at all times and everywhere gave his 
strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, 
his sympathy to the suffering, and his heart to 
God." 

At least three decisions of General Lee and 
their consequent events in his life, were so im- 
portant, and so illustrative of his character, that 
they must be recalled here in closing this imper- 
fect account. These were the surrender of his 
army; the choice of the presidency of Washing- 
ton College; and his dying without saying a 
word or leaving a line to vindicate his conduct 
or enhance his fame. 

Whilst moving his army and trains towards 
Appomattox, the situation ( for which Lee was 
in no wise responsible, because he would, if 
allowed, have chosen a better line of defense, 
months before he was forced to^ leave Peters- 
burg and give up Richmond) became so nearly 
hopeless through hunger, weakness, marching, 
fighting, wounds, captures, desertions and the 
death of brave men, steadfast to the end, that 



26 Lee and His Cause 

a desperate attack in the early morning of April 
9th was ordered upon Grant's surrounding 
hosts, in strength, "five times our numbers." 
Col. C. S. Venable, at the General's request, 
rode to the front at three o'clock that morning 
to ask General Gordon if he could cut his way 
through the enemy. He found Gordon with 
the Chief of Cavalry, Fitzhugh Lee, planning 
the movement. In reply to the Commander's 
inquiry, Gordon said: 'Tell General Lee I 
have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear 
I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported 
by Longstreet's corps." The last attack by 
Gordon's men had routed Sheridan's cavalry 
and brought in prisoners and captured cannon, 
but it also uncovered heavy lines of infantry be- 
yond. When Gordon's reply was borne back to 
Lee, he said, "Then there is nothing left me 
but to go and see General Grant, and I would 
rather die a thousand deaths." A heart-broken 
subaltern standing near cried, "O General, 
what will History say of the surrender of the 
army in the field ?" Lee replied, "Yes, I know 
they will say hard things of us; they will not 
understand how we were overwhelmed by num- 
bers ; but that is not the question, Colonel ; the 
question is, Is it right to surrender this army? 



Lee and His Cause 27 

If it is right, then / will take all the responsi- 
bility." 

For General Lee to know his duty was to 
do it. At Appomattox, he saw it clearly and 
did it promptly. What it cost him to hand over 
to his enemy "that body of incomparable in- 
fantry, the Army of Northern Virginia," that 
ragged, half-starved, fighting remnant, no 
words can tell, unless it may be summed up in 
these two — his life! General Gordon, in a de- 
liberate, carefully prepared address delivered at 
Richmond soon after Lee's death, said : "Can 
I ever forget? No, never, never, can I forget 
the words which fell from his lips as I rode 
beside him amid the dejected and weeping sol- 
diers, when turning to me, he said, 'I could 
wish that I were numbered among the fallen in 
the last battle.' " 

The soldier's death would have been the easy, 
the glorious thing. Lee craved it, and spoke 
of it, but was too great and good to court it. 
He chose the harder lot of living and work- 
ing, suffering and sorrowing over his van- 
quished people and ruined country. During 
the agonizing hours of suspense and whilst 
he was weighing the momentous interests 
and obligations involved in the question of 



28 Lee and His Cause 

longer resistance — ^burdened with the trust 
laid upon him, and bending under the weight 
of woe about to fall upon his beloved South- 
land — he exclaimed from the depth of his 
tender heart, — so one of his officers tells us, — 
''How easily I could get rid of this and be 
at rest! I have only to ride along the lines 
and all will be over ! But, it is our duty to live 
— for what will become of the women and chil- 
dren of the South, if we are not here to support 
and protect them ?" Fortunately, our splendid 
leader had the strength to do this ; and for five 
and a half years did it. The one thing that he 
was determined to die rather than do, was not 
so much as named to him. General J. A. Early 
declares that, in his last conversation with Lee, 
when the surrender was mentioned, Lee told 
him that he ''had only 7,900 men with arms in 
their hands, but that when he went to meet 
General Grant, he left orders with Gordon and 
Longstreet to hold themselves in readiness, and 
that he had determined to cut his way out at all 
hazards, if such terms were not granted as he 
thought his army was entitled to demand." 
General Lee had feared to suggest to Grant 
any willingness to listen to terms, lest Grant 
should suspect his weakness and ask "an un- 



Lee and His Cause 29 

conditional surrender," and "sooner than that, 
I am resolved to die," so reads the record 
made by General Fitzhugh Lee. General Grant 
perhaps knew the Confederate Chieftain too 
well to mention any "terms inconsistent with 
the honor of my army." So far from it, he re- 
quested General Lee to state what he regarded 
as honorable terms, and when it had been done, 
Grant assented and wrote them, at Lee's re- 
quest, and then both captains signed them, and 
Lee and his aide, Colonel Marshall, rode off, 
prisoners on parole. He had calmly taken "all 
the responsibility." Forty-two years have 
rolled away, and with them soldiers, great and 
small, but till now, no voice has been heard in 
condemnation of the men or his deed. 

With the close of his career as Commander 
of the Confederate Armies, there came to Gen- 
eral Lee the question of future employment. 
Many business interests sought his services. 
Among these, a corporation in Atlanta made 
him an offer with very fine salary. A wealthy 
insurance company would have given many 
thousands for the mere use of his name. His 
preference, as expressed in a letter to a friend, 
was a "little quiet house in the woods, where I 
can procure shelter and my daily bread, if per- 



30 Lee and His Cause 

mitted by the victor. I wish to get Mrs. Lee 
out of the city as soon as practicable." The 
curiosity of crowds and homage of admirers 
was more than they could bear. 

Very lucrative business proposals were kindiy 
declined. To one such, his reply was : *'I am 
grateful, but I have a self-imposed task which 
I must accomplish. I have led the young men 
of the South in battle; I have seen many of 
them die on the field ; I shall devote my remain- 
ing energies to training young men to do their 
duty in life." 

The presidency of more than one university 
was declined for some one or another reason. 
On August 5, 1865, he was lovingly urged to 
accept the headship of "Washington College of 
Virginia." There was in the offer, says Pro- 
fessor E. S. Joynes, who knew it best, "abso- 
lutely nothing that could have tempted him." 
His habits, associations, pecuniary interests and 
strong desires for privacy and quietude were all 
against it. The school had merely local reputa- 
tion and patronage. The salary was only 
$1,500; hardly half a living for those cruel 
times. The college buildings, apparatus, libra- 
ries, and investments were all wrecked by the 
waves of war. Nor had it credit, patronage, or 



Lee and His Cause 31 

prospects to speak of. The faculty of four had 
been only partially paid and the students num- 
bered but forty. There was also considerable 
debt. Our land was wasted, our people crushed, 
our hopes buried. Everywhere the struggle 
was for food and fire and shelter; not for the 
arts or sciences or literature. The position 
could confer neither fame nor fortune. Its 
acceptance by General Lee was due, says Pro- 
fessor Joynes, "to a profound and deliberate 
sense of duty." Why ! the man who carried him 
the official notification of his election to the 
presidency had to borrow the money for his 
journey's expense, and also the suit of clothes 
that he wore, and which had been recently sent 
to his friend by a son sojourning in New York, 
in order to appear decently garbed before the 
greatest of Virginians. The bearer of the 
honor to be bestowed upon Lee was the Hon. 
John W. Brockenbrough, Rector of the college, 
and thus was obtained his outfit for the mis- 
sion. 

General Washington had in 1785, accepted 
from the State of Virginia $50,000, as a gift 
in appreciation of his very successful services 
to the Commonwealth and the Union, upon 
condition that he might use it "for the educa- 



32 Lee and His Cause 

tion of the children of the poor, particularly of 
such as had fallen in defense of their country." 
This sum he had donated to the school then 
known as ''Liberty Hall Academy/' and thence- 
forward by his own honored name. The 
friends of General Lee believe that his desires 
so far coincided with this deed and desire of 
Washington as to have determined him in the 
devotion of his remaining years to the same 
noble end. To him it seemed, says Bishop Wil- 
mer "the door of Providence." It was the op- 
portunity to do somewhat by way of compensa- 
tion to Virginia for the loss of her wealth, 
strength and manhood. He seized and used it. 
The Trustees, who having neither silver nor 
gold, had the wisdoms and "happy audacity" to 
choose Lee for their College's Head Master, 
made no mistake. So correct was their knowl- 
edge of his character, and so well-founded their 
faith in his impoverished countrymen, that all 
the rest worked out rightly. They gave Lee 
work and bread, and he brought to their Col- 
lege, honor, patronage, and immortality. 

If any doubt could have arisen as to the 
motives of the Christian soldier in taking the 
President's place, or as to his fitness for it, it 
must have been dispelled by his own remark to 



Lee and His Cause 33 

Dr. W. S. White : "I shall be disappointed, sir, 
I shall fail in the leading object that brought 
me here, unless these young men all become 
consistent Christians." Again, he said, — "I 
dread the thought of any student's going away 
from the College without becoming a sincere 
Christian." And he was not denied the desire 
of his heart in seeing the salvation of "many of 
the young men of the South." 

General Lee left nothing in the way of vindi- 
cation of his choice or career. Conscious of his 
rectitude, he was unconcerned for his fame. 
Till his death, he was silent, though often urged 
to write. For a time, he did think of a narra- 
tive of his campaigns, and made a slight effort 
to collect materials for it, but being denied all 
use of the records in Government custody, and 
the destruction in the retreat of his own per- 
sonal papers still further preventing him, the 
thought was given up. Nor was it ever in his 
mind to publish anything to justify himself. In 
requesting from one of his generals a report, he 
plainly tells him — "I shall write this history not 
to vindicate myself, or promote my own reputa- 
tion. I want that the world shall know what 
my poor boys, with their small numbers and 
scant resources, succeeded in accomplishing." 



34 Lee and His Cause 

To another, he wrote — ''My only object is to 
transmit the truth to posterity and to do justice 
to our brave soldiers." And more than any- 
thing else, let it be ever remembered, that the 
fear of bringing blame upon some whose fail- 
ure to obey orders had been most disastrous 
to our cause prevented Lee from writing in 
honor of the men whose devotion, gallantry, 
endurance and achievement have become the 
wonder of the world. 

An extract from a letter written to General 
J. A. Early in Mexico, March 15, 1866, shows 
clearly how very reluctant he was to speak or 
write, even in his own defense. He refers first 
to attacks being then made upon President 
Davis, and later says — "The accusations 
against myself I have not thought proper to 
notice, or even to correct misrepresentations of 
my words and acts. We shall have to be pa- 
tient, and suffer for a while at least; and all 
controversy, I think, will only serve to prolong 
angry and bitter feelings, and postpone the 
period when reason and charity ma)^ resume 
their sway." 

A month later, to another friend, he writes ; — 

"Your letter of the 5th inst., inclosing a 

slip from the Baltimore American, has been 



Lee and His Cause 3$ 

received. The same statement has been pub- 
lished at the North for several years. The 
statement is not true, but I have not thought 
proper to publish a contradiction; . . . . 
believing that those who know me would not 
credit it, and those who do not would care 
nothing about it. I cannot now depart from 
the rule I have followed. It is so easy to 
make accusations against the people at the 
South upon similar testimony, that those so 
disposed, should one be refuted, will imme- 
diately create another; and thus you would 
be led into endless controversy. I think it 
is better to leave their correction to the re- 
turn of reason and good feeling. Thanking 
you for your interest in my behalf, and beg- 
ging you to consider my letter as intended 
only for yourself, I am, most respectfully, 
your obedient servant, R. E. Lee." 

There is scarce an end to such expressions 
of repugnance to speak upon the platform or 
write for the press, either in behalf of him- 
self or in defense of his people. He longed 
for peace and good will, regardless of repu- 
tation, past, present or to come, and hence 
could not be moved by love or lucre to break 
his self-imposed silence. Thus he lived and 



2,6 Lee and His Cause 

died, the unpardoned patriot, the paroled 
prisoner, the citizen without a country, or the 
right to vote in the State which his fathers 
and he had fought to liberate, establish, en- 
large and ennoble. Two of his utterances can 
never be forgotten ; "I determined at the outset 
of her difficulties to share the fate of my peo- 
ple." Once in replying to Hon. Robert Quid's 
letter proposing to him to accept the nomina- 
tion for the Governorship of Virginia, in de- 
ference to the wishes of the leading men of 
the Commonwealth, Lee concludes his refusal 
of the honor in this language; — "If my dis- 
franchisement and privation of civil rights 
would secure to the citizens of the State the 
enjoyment of civil liberty and equal rights 
under the Constitution, I would willingly ac- 
cept them in their stead." How noble! How 
like the magnanimous Soul, who riding about 
on the bloody field of Gettysburg to rally his 
retreating troops after that murderous re- 
pulse, for which certain subordinate com- 
manders were alone to blame, said so cheerfully 
— ''Never mind, men; all this has been my 
fault. It is I that have lost this fight, and you 
must help me out of it, the best w'ay you can." 
Was ever nobility so noble ? 



Lee and His Cause 37 

In sheer despair, my comrades, I leave Lee 
for your leisure, and to your library, whilst 
I turn to topics which have not been so often 
presented, or so eloquently depicted — to the 
cause and consequent war, matters so much 
misunderstood; so often misrepresented. 



I/' 



& 



II. 



My Country ; may she be always in the right ; but 
right or wrong, my country. — commodore stephen 
Decatur. 

THAT CONFLICT WAS PLAINLY 
A PEOPLE'S WAR. 

The whole heart of Dixie was in it. As a 
people the South deeply deplored, but bravely 
accepted it, and fought it through to the end, 
the bitter end. Not all were secessionists, but 
the majority were, and the rest rapidly became 
so. Not all believed in slavery, but the masses 
did. The Union had no truer friend than Lee 
himself, who said, "I think slavery a greater 
evil to the white than to the black race." And 
his State had opposed it even in her Colonial 
days. Lee had declared, "If the millions of 
slaves in the South were mine, I would free 
them with a stroke of the pen, to avert this i/ 
war." Thomas Jefferson, the expounder of 
States' Rights and the founder of Democracy, 



Lee and His Cause 39 

had been "The consistent enemy of every 
form of slavery." Patrick Henry once said — 
"Much as I deplore slavery, I see that pru- 
dence forbids its abolition." And Virginia, 
the proud mother of these patriots, was the 
first of all the American commonwealths to 
outlaw the slave trade. Secession also was 
firmly opposed by many who later died for 
Dixie under the Stars and Bars; but the war 
was something different; it was forced upon 
us, and it was for political self-preserva- 
tion,— "For God, and Home, and native 
LandP The war was for the very existence 
of sovereign States, for "life, liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness," — not to break up the 
Union. We had nothing against the Union, 
but very much against the party which was 
running the Federal Government, and it was 
only when all hope of bringing it, vis. the 
Abolition majority — to respect the Constitu- 
tion and laws of the Union had died in loyal 
breasts, only then, that ordinances of secession 
were passed, and the "Solid South" began to 
be. There was in Southern hearts no lack of 
loyalty to the General Government : the trouble 
was the sad want of loyalty on the part of the 
Government to the local welfare and political 



40 Lee and His Cause 

rights of the Southern people. According to 
Mr. R. E. Lee, Jr., the withdrawal of the 
r/ States grew out of that. 

A more intelligent and truthful witness liv- 
ing or dead could not be found to testify upon 
this subject than Bishop George F. Pierce, nor 
did any such witness ever speak more elo- 
quently in defense of his people than did he 
in his 'Tast Day Sermon, delivered before the 
General Assembly of Georgia, in the city of 
Millidgeville, on March 27th, 1863," in which 
I find the following undeniable statement: — 
"This war is not of our seeking. We labored 
to avoid it. Our propositions for amicable ad- 
justment were rejected with subtlety and guile. 
We claimed only our own. We asked nothing 
of our enemies. We do not seek their land, or 
houses, or property. We are not fighting to 
extend our territory, to subdue a neighboring 
people, to usurp dominion, to gratify ambition, 
or malice, or revenge. Faithful to the letter 
and the spirit of the old Constitution — assert- 
ing only the fundamental right of self-govern- 
ment, we are but defending ourselves against 
a proud, rapacious, malignant foe, who, with- 
out right or reason, against law and right and 



Lee and His Cause 41 

humanity, comes down full of hate and rage 
to enslave or exterminate us. We are fighting 
for liberty and home and family; for firesides 
and fields and altars ; for all that is dear to the 
brave, or precious to the good; for our herds 
and our flocks, our men servants and maid 
servants; for the heritage of our fathers and 
the rights of our children; for the honor of 
humanity and the institutions of Providence. 
We are fighting against robbery and lust and 
rapine ; against ruthless invasion, a treacherous 
despotism, the blight of its own land, and the 
scorn of the world; mongrel armies whose 
bond of union is plunder, and whose watch- 
words are but delusion and falsehood ; a fraud 
upon the African, a lie to the North, and an 
insult to the South. There is therefore no 
object proposed by our Government, no end 
aimed at on which we may not consistently, 
piously, Scripturally invoke the Divine bless- 
ing. We may pray "according to the will of 
God.'' The triumph of our arms is the tri- 
umph of rig^ht and truth and justice. The de- 
feat of our enemies is the defeat of wrong and 
malice and outrage. Our Confederacy has 
committed herself to no iniquitous policy, no 



42 Lee and His Cause 

unholy alliances, no unwarrantable plans 
either for defense or retaliation, and now, with 
numerous hostile hosts quartered on her soil, 
and a powerful navy beleaguering her coast, 
amid provocations innumerable, under threat- 
enings the most diabolical, without fear of the 
future, ready for the conflict if our deluded, 
infatuated enemies urge it on her, she is ready 
to make peace on just and honorable terms. 
In praying for such a government, I feel that 
the way to the mercy seat is open. My faith is 
unembarrassed. My hope is buoyant. I feel 
that I have access to Him who rules in 
righteousness. The attitude of our country is 
sublime. With her foot planted on right and 
her trust in God, undismayed by numbers and 
anmaments and navies, without the sympathy 
of the world, shut in, cut off, alone, she has 
battled through two long, weary years, gal- 
lantly, heroically, triumphantly, and to-day is 
stronger in men, resources, faith and hope than 
when Fort Sumter's proud flag was lowered 
to her maiden arms. It is the Lord's doing, 
and it is marvelous in our eyes. Standing, 
then, upon the justice of our cause and the 
righteousness of our aim, and encouraged by 



Lee and His Cause 43 

the experience of the past, let us Hft up humble, 
thankful hearts to the God of all our mercies, 
and with emboldened faith commit our destiny 
into His hand, whom winds and seas obey, who 
ruleth in the armies of heaven and among the 
inhabitants of earth." 

The ordinances of secession were acts of the 
people's representatives, and so, of the people 
themselves; not of the politicians, as we are 
now told, on every side. Hear one speak who 
has the best right to testify. When Mr. Lin- 
coln made the call for troops to invade the 
South, the President of the Virginia Conven- 
tion, Mr. J. B. Baldwin, who had himself 
voted against secession, said — "There are 
now no Union mqn in Virginia; but those 
who were Union men will stand to their arms, 
and make a fight which shall go down in his- 
tory as an illustration of what a brave people 
will do in defense of their liberties, after 
having exhausted every means of pacifica- 
tion." 

Was this not a true prophet? And his 
statement concerning Virginia applies as well 
to the other Southern States. There were 
many Unionists among the ignorant and illit- 
erate mountaineers of Eastern Kentucky and 



44 Lee and His Cause 

Tennessee and Western Virginia, but the 
South -was practically solid for secession 
after Lincoln's call for troops to subdue 
her. General Lee was himself a leader, social, 
civil, and military, yet even he was not needed 
to lead the secession movement. He was 
rather a reluctant and unwilling witness of it. 
He thought it a calamity. Whilst it was 
going forward, he wTOte on January 23d, 
1 86 1, "I must try and be patient and await 
the end, for I can do nothing to hasten or re- 
tard it." I do not deny that political doctrine 
had political expounders, nor that they did a 
deal of talking, but the people, as free citi- 
zens, did both the voting and the fighting. 
They had to, and so the war became their 
own; it absorbed them; in it the sun rose and 
set ; to it, they gave their time, money, energy, 
heads, hearts, fortunes, families and sacred 
honor; for it everything gave way, at home 
and abroad, public and private, civil and 
social, educational and religious, domestic and 
governmental. It was soon the theme of 
shop and street, of fireside and counting-room, 
of barn and business house; it filled our 
papers, letters, songs, sermons, prayers, table- 
talk and telegrams; it speedily closed out our 



Lee and His Cause 45 

schools and colleges, shut up stores, banks, 
places of amusement, resorts of pleasure and 
health, and even houses of worship; it opened 
mines for lead, copper and saltpetre, mills for 
cotton-thread, for domestic yarns, for high 
explosives, for percussion caps, for rifles, bayo- 
nets, saddles and sabers. The business of 
turning out blankets, clothes, shoes, hats, can- 
teens, cartridge boxes and cooking utensils, 
was booming from Texas to old Virginia. 
Magazines, hospitals, bureaus of information, 
depots of supplies sprang up as by magic. 
Then appeared those domestic legions, that 
no man could number, of wool-carders, yarn- 
spinners, sock-knitters, weavers of cloths, the 
gray, and the brown, and the mixed, like 
Joseph's coat; but what were these compared 
with the glove-makers, the hat and helmet 
braiders, button-cutters, belt, buckle, and 
sword-knot contrivers; or these compared to 
the braiders of gold lace, weavers of rye 
straw, and makers of battle flags, and needle- 
books, and smoking-bags, women of whom 
the world was not worthy! These equipped 
us for the field and cared for us in the camp, 
cheered us to the battle and nursed us in the 
hospital. Why! the war furnished more 



46 Lee and His Cause 

trained nurses the first year than the schools 
of Christendom had in all her centuries! It 
raised up a host of boy scouts, women spies, 
and sent out scores of female blockade runners. 
It vacated the bench, and bar, and pulpit, and 
college hall, and editorial chair, and banker's 
desk, and mechanic's stool, and every place of 
sweet repose or of peaceful toil. It left the 
forge cold, the foundry silent, the flock un- 
tended, the field unturned, the sick to suffer 
alone, and weeping women to bury their de- 
voted dead. Oh ! its transforming power was 
marvelous. It made the old young, the weak 
strong, the sick well, the foreigner as the na- 
tive, the sojourner as the citizen, or it made 
them get out of Dixie Land ! Believe me, the 
men all went to boots and beard ; the women all 
became angels clad in homespun ; the girls cried 
to become boys and join the cavalry, and the 
boys had to be locked up to keep them from 
running off to Manassas. The very negroes 
shared the general feeling and hundreds went 
with young Marse to help whip "Dem Yanks." 
Mothers and daughters, wives and widows, 
sisters and sweethearts organized regular re- 
liefs to feed, clothe, bathe, nurse, watch by. 



Lee and His Cause 47 

read to, write for, sing with, and pray over 
the wounded and bury the dead. 

The war reformed society, created new 
classes, set new fashions, estabhshed new in- 
dustries, organized new charities, gave us new 
ideals of duty, new tests of friendship, new 
charms to womanhood, new proofs of patriot- 
is!m, new motives for living, new delights in 
dying. It fused and moulded into one solid 
and glorious mass the whole population, with 
all its sorts, sexes, sizes, orders, ranks, creeds, 
colors and conditions of folk, native and 
foreign, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gen- 
tile, and so made the awful engine that we 
called "The Army," to smite and hurl back the 
hated, dreaded Yankee! It could be done, it 
had to be done; the only question was, who 
could help most to do it? Oh, the Southern 
heart was hot, it burned and blazed, and this 
enthusiasm inspired its songs, winged its 
prayers, crowded its camps, built its ships, sup- 
ported its Congress, framed its laws, created 
its literature and revived its religion; gave us 
a life worth living, a death worth dying, and a 
Heaven worth going to — the place of peace 
and rest to which no hated enemy could ever 
come, forever and forever! Is it strange that 



48 Lee and His Cause 

everybody was for it? The wonder is that 
anybody could stay at home. BeHeve me, "It 
robbed the cradle and the grave," so eager 
were our people to share its triumph or die 
with its defeat. 

The South was never so whole-hearted, so 
uplifted, so self-consecrated in any cause, 
before or since. Never! The war feeling 
was not limited to the army or monopolized 
by the men, it was even more intense among 
the women. But here I must allow one of 
them to speak for all her own sex. I find 
the simple, eloquent utterance in the ''Con- 
federate Veteran^^ of a recent month. It 
is from an address of welcome made by Mrs. 
Sarah D. Eggleston, of Mississippi, to the 
United Daughters of the Confederacy, in their 
last annual assembly, and its simplicity and 
pathos are fully equalled by its truthfulness. 
I like it better than anything I have ever seen 
from the hand of man, for it manifests better 
the very heart of our people. The letter and 
spirit are all her own, and the world has none 
like her — The Southern Woman! Mrs. Eg- 
gleston says: — "The men gave, or offered to 
give their lives. The women gave what was 
dearer to them than life: they gave the men 



Lee and His Cause 49 

they loved. I will give some instances to 
prove the spirit of those women. I had a 
friend, a widow, who had only two sons. 
They both enlisted for the war. The first one 
was killed in the battle of Fredericksburg; the 
other was killed by the same volley that laid 
low our immortal Jackson at Chancellorsville, 
and this heroic boy, with his lifeblood ebbing 
fast, had only breath to gasp : 'Ts the General 
hurt?" When I was weeping with that poor 
mother, she said : "Both of my boys are gone ; 
but if I had to do all this over again, I would 
not act differently." 

I knew a boy who belonged to the company 
that was organized in the village where I am 
now living. When he had been in Virginia 
over two years and had been in many battles, 
his mother wrote to President Davis, using 
these words : 'T notice that General Lee has 
gone into winter quarters and there will be no 
more fighting for several weeks ; so, if my boy 
has done his duty, I respectfully beg that he be 
granted a furlough, that he may come home to 
me, for I greatly long to see him." Mark the 
simplicity and sublimity of that mother's 
words : '7/ my hoy has done his duty." 



50 Lee and His Cause 

Bishop Polk gives an instance of the sublime 
devotion of a Tennessee mother who gave five 
sons to the Confederacy. When the first one 
was killed, and the Bishop was trying to say 
some words of comfort, she said: "My son 
Billy will be old enough next spring to take his 
brother's place." The only idea of duty that 
this heroic mother had was to give her sons 
to the cause she loved, as soon as they were 
old enough to bear a musket. Such was the 
spirit of your mothers and your grandmothers. 

I will tell you of two funerals that I wit- 
nessed — one in 1861, the other in 1865. I was 
in New Orleans in the early part of the sum- 
mer of 1861 when I witnessed the funeral of 
the gallant Colonel Charley Dreux, who had 
been killed in a skirmish in Virginia before any 
of the great battles had been fought. He was 
the first Louisianian who had the honor of 
sealing his devotion to the cause with his blood, 
and among the very first from any State. 
When he was borne to his last resting place, a 
vast concourse of people followed with droop- 
ing flags, muffled drums, bands playing the 
dead march, and the tolling of all the church 
bells of the city. It was indeed such a funeral 



Lee and His Cause 51 

as befitted a hero who had died in the defense 
of his country. 

Far different was it, nearly four years later, 
when I was in Mobile during those last sad 
weeks of the war. The enemy were vigor- 
ously pushing the siege against Spanish Fort, 
across the bay from Mobile. The roar of the 
cannon was heard above all the noises of the 
city. I was attending service in Trinity 
Church, for while the men were fighting, the 
women were praying. The services were pro- 
gressing, and we heard the mufiled tread of 
feet, when, looking up, I saw eight soldiers in 
their worn and faded gray, and on their 
shoulders was a rude, pine coffin which con- 
tained the remains of a comrade who had been 
killed that morning at Spanish Fort. The 
burial squad, taking their comrade for burial, 
had seen the church door open, and, hearing 
the voice of the minister, had gone in, that 
some prayers might be said over the fallen 
soldier. Slowly and sadly they bore him down 
the aisle, placing him at the foot of the chancel, 
they standing reverently about the coffin. 
Without one word, the aged minister began 
the burial service, all of us joining in. We did 
not know over whom those prayers were said ; 



52 Lee and His Cause 

but we did know that he was the father, or hus- 
band, or son, or brother, or lover of some 
Southern woman, and we knew that he had 
died in defense of his country. The services 
over and the burial squad having removed their 
dead comrade from the church, the congrega- 
tion slowly dispersed, some of us being loath 
to return to our lonely apartments. It so 
chanced that I was the last person to leave the 
church ; and when I reached the steps, I saw a 
woman standing there. Doubtless she saw in 
my face the same tense anxiety which I had 
noticed in hers, for, pointing in the direction 
of the Spanish Fort, she said in a voice that I 
have never forgotten : *'0, listen to those 
guns ! All that I have in this world, my only 
boy is there." And I said : — "And my hus- 
band is there too." 

During the four years of the war it was my 
lot to hear the guns of three besieged cities — 
Vicksburg, Richmond and Mobile. I saw 
many partings on the eve of battle. But 
seldom did I see women weep when those fare- 
wells were taken. We parted from our loved 
ones with a smile upon our lips ; but when the 
night came, our pillows would be wet with 
tears. 



Lee and His Cause 53 

I have told you some things that I saw. I 
will now tell you what I did not see. I saw 
no mother trying- to keep her boys from going 
into battle, I saw no wife trying to persuade 
her husband not to go to the front, and I saw 
no woman who cried, " Surrender T If you ask 
me to explain this, my answer is : — "Because 
we knew we were right, our cause was just." 

Comrades, does that sound like the utterance 
of a politician, "a fire-eater;" or is it the voice 
of a Southern woman — the revelation of her 
Confederate soul ? Ah ! Gentlemen, it was that 
self-same spirit, which in the soldier, swept the 
field at Shiloh, and stubbornly held the ground 
at the second battle of Manassas and in ''the 
bloody Angle," and again on the gory field of 
Sharpsburg, that broke the Yankee lines at 
Chancellorsville and sent the blue-coats flying 
from Chickamauga, that stormed the cannon- 
crowned heights of Gettysburg, and piercing 
the Union centre, waved the red flag of the 
Confederacy in the very faces of its foes ! Yes, 
comrades, it was the Southern woman that was 
in us ! God bless them forever ! 



III. 



The greatest calamity that can befall a State is 
for its people to forget its origin. 

— William E. Gladstone. 

We cannot ESCAPE history. — Abraham Lincoln. 

UPON OUR PART, IT WAS A 
JUSTIFIABLE WAR. 

The Confederate cause was as good as the 
support it had ; it couldn't be so now, of course, 
for the case is altered, the law is different ; the 
amendments are ratified and respected; but 
then the Constitution had not a line in it against 
secession, and all analogy favored it. Seces- 
sion had been frequently threatened, and once, 
had been actually practiced. Rhode Island is 
doubly distinguished, though she is the small- 
est of the States, she was once the champion of 
''State's rights." She was the last to enter 
"The Union," but she had been the first to 
secede from "The Confederation." She had 



Lee and His Cause 55 

entered that "Perpetual Union," in 1781, but 
in less than five years, in 1786, she kicked out 
of it, and recalled her delegates from its Con- 
gress ; nor did she re-enter the family of States 
for four long years, or until 1790; not until 
she had waited two years and seven months 
after the adoption of the Constitution, and over 
a year and one- fourth after it had been ratified 
by the other twelve States, and was in full 
operation; yet no attempt was ever made to 
coerce her. Rhode Island's ratification was on 
May 29th, 1 790, and even at that late day, such 
was her fear of imperilling her precious 
sovereignty that she expressly reserved the 
right to withdraw again, if her welfare should 
require it; declaring *'that the powers of gov- 
ernment may be reassumed by the people when- 
soever it shall become necessary to their happi- 
ness." Could South Carolina have claimed 
any more? Certainly, she never enacted any 
more, although she had more abundant provo- 
cation. 

When the Louisiana Purchase was proposed 
in 1803, there was in the Northeast a strong 
dissatisfaction, because — "The influence of our 
part of the Union (New England) must be 
diminished by the acquisition of more weight 



56 Lee and His Cause 

at the other end." Mr. Tracy, of Connecticut, 
gave terse and timely expression to the North- 
ern view and their opposition to this territorial 
addition, when he declared that it would result 
in ^'absorbing the Northern States and render 
them insignificant in the Union." Moved by 
that consideration, the Legislature of Massa- 
chusetts in 1804, resolved — "That the annexa- 
tion of Louisiana to the Union transcends the 
power of United States' Government. It 
forms a new Confederacy, to which the States 
united by the former compact are not bound to 
adhere." 

Ten years before this, Dr. Fisher Ames of 
Boston, a member of the Massachusetts Con- 
vention, which in 1788 had adopted our 
Federal Constitution, the orator, statesman, 
and friend of Washington, confessed that, 
"The spirit of insurrection has tainted a vast 
extent of country besides Pennsylvania." And 
Governor Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, in 
1796, dreading the election of Jefferson, boldly 
advocated disunion. He said — "I sincerely 
declare that I wish the Northern States would 
separate from the Southern the moment the 
election of Jefferson shall take place." How 
is that for a son of Yale — a judge of law, a 



Lee and His Cause 57 

Major-general in the Army, and a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence? 

In 1805, Governor Plumer of New Hamp- 
shire acknowledged that the New England 
patriots entertained the purpose of breaking up 
the Union. The scheme was to be made good 
by putting a suitable man at the head of a mili- 
tary force strong enough to accomplish it. 
This conspiracy of 1803-4 was announced to 
all men by no less a person than John Quincy 
Adams over his own name — so says Dr. J. L. 
M. Curry and several others. A denial of it 
has never been heard. 

Colonel T. Pickering, who was a member in 
good standing of Washington's Cabinet and 
his Postmaster General, and Secretary of State, 
and also a Senator from Massachusetts, was 
troubled somewhat over the political situation, 
but saw a hopeful solution. He writes — 
December 24, 1803, — 'T will not yet despair. I 
will rather anticipate a new Confederacy, 
exempt from the corrupt and corrupting in- 
fluence and oppression of the South. There 
will be (and our children, at farthest, will see 
it) a separation. The white and black popu- 
lation will mark the boundary." This pros- 
pect was in nowise discouraging, for the prog- 



58 Lee and His Cause 

nosticator could see neither fire nor blood. He 
says, "The principles of our Revolution point 
to the remedy — a separation. That this can be 
accomplished, and without spilling one drop of 
blood, I have little doubt." Such views sound 
strangely enough now, and down South, but 
one hundred and four years ago, and in the 
loyal (?) State of Massachusetts, they struck, 
with responsive moral effect, the great New 
England heart! 

The admission of Louisiana came under dis- 
cussion in 1811, when one Senator said: 'Tf 
this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that 
it is a virtual dissolution of the Union ; that it 
will free the States from their moral obliga- 
tion, and as it will be the right of all, so it will 
be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a 
separation, amicably if they can, violently, if 
they must." This sounds like South Carolina, 
but it was the speech of Honorable Josiah 
Quincy of Boston, and the first distinct advo- 
cacy of disunion, just fifty years before the 
South enacted it. An objection was raised, 
but no dispute made of the right. A Southern 
member, Mr. Pointdexter objected, that, ''The 
suggestion of a dissolution of the Union is out 
of order." The point was decided by the 



Lee and His Cause 59 

Chair against Mr. Quincy, but when an appeal 
was tLken to the House, Quincy was endorsed 
by a two-thirds vote; so it was not out of order 
in the Congress of the United States in 181 1, 
to avow the doctrine of even "violent" seces- 
sion, provided only that it be done by sons of 
Massachusetts. In support of his position, 
Mr. Quincy said — "Is there a principle of pub- 
lic law better settled, or more conformable to 
the plainest suggestions of reason, than that 
the violation of the contract by one of the 
parties may be considered as exempting the 
other from its obligations? Suppose in private 
life, thirteen form a partnership and ten of 
them undertake to admit a new partner with- 
out the concurrence of the other three. Would 
it not be at their option to abandon the partner- 
ship after so palpable an infringement of their 
rights?" 

When the Federal Secretary of War issued 
in 181 2, a call for troops from Massachusetts, 
Rhode Island and Connecticut, to fight against 
Great Britain, their governors sent him a stern 
refusal, and the Legislature of Connecticut in 
supporting the Governor, "Denounced the war, 
and declared that Commonwealth to be a free, 
and sovereign and independent State, and that 



6o Lee and His Cause 

the United States was not a national, but a 
Confederated Republic." And this novel doc- 
trine was solemnly sanctioned by the Supreme 
Court of the dear old, Nutmeg State! Here 
we see the same doctrine held and avowed and 
judicially sanctioned in 1812 by Connecticut 
that was taught by Calhoun and acted upon by 
South Carolina in i860 — fifty years later! 

Although made to resist the so-called ''right 
of search/' and to punish the unlawful seizure 
of American ships and seamen by British 
Captains, "the War of 181 2 was generally and 
bitterly opposed by all New England;" at least 
after she felt its effects upon her commerce. 
The Canadian campaign was denounced ''as 
cruel, wanton, senseless and wicked" — as "so 
fertile in calamities, and so threatening in its 
consequences, as being waged with the worst 
possible views, and carried on in the worst pos- 
sible manner, forming a Union of wickedness 
and weakness, which defies for a parallel the 
annals of the world." Such sentiments would 
now consign to infamy any Southern Legisla- 
tive body, but this record is opened here only 
because of some other sayings and doings 
necessary to be noticed. 



Lee and His Cause 6i 

The ''Hartford Convention" met, December 
15th, 1 8 14, whilst Washington City was in 
British hands, and our Executive Mansion and 
Capitol lay in heaps of ashes. For three weeks 
it brooded over disunion measures. It failed 
to hatch out an ordinance of secession, but the 
fault was not the Convention's. The failure 
was due to Jackson's victory over the English 
at New Orleans. These original secessionists 
did however pass resolutions asserting a State's 
right of interposition, and, as President Roose- 
velt says, "So framed its action as to justify 
seceding or not seceding, as events turned 
out." On this point, the Convention itself 
said — 'Tf secession should become necessary 
by reason of the multiplied abuses of bad ad- 
ministration, it should if possible, be the work 
of peaceable times, and deliberate consent." 
Another deliverance of this remarkable body is 
noteworthy. The record reads — "It is as much 
the duty of the State authorties to watch over 
the rights reserved as it is of the United States 
to exercise the powers delegated.'' And then, 
to cap the climax, we have this — 'Tn case of 
deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions 
of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of 
the State and liberties of the people, it is not 



62 Lee and His Cause 

only the right, but the duty of each State to in- 
terpose its authority for their protection." 
We are favored with still another wholesome 
utterance by the same high authority, namely, 
— "When emergencies occur which are beyond 
the reach of judicial tribunals, or too pressing 
to admit of the delay incident to their forms. 
States which have no common umpire must 
be their own judges, and execute their own 
decisions." 

Among many interesting items, this ortho- 
dox assembly handed down to coming genera- 
tions this deliberate decision — "that Custom 
duties collected in New England should be paid 
to the States within whose borders they were 
collected, and not to the United States." Mr. 
John Fiske, M. A., LL. D., historian, graduate 
of Harvard and native of Hartford, Connecti- 
cut, says, "that this would have virtually dis- 
solved the Union." 

The temper and intention of these able and 
honored leaders of public opinion may be 
learned from the published testimony of Gov- 
ernor Plumer of New Hampshire. He writes, 
"I am certain that, upon retiring early one 
evening from dining with Aaron Burr, Mr. 
Hilhouse said in an animated tone, *The East- 



Lee and His Cause 63 

ern States must and will dissolve the Union, 
and form a separate Government of their own : 
and the sooner they do this the better.' I 
think that the first man who mentioned the sub- 
ject of a dismemberment was Samuel Hunt, a 
representative of New Hampshire. But there 
was no man with whom I conversed so often, 
so freely and fully as with Robert Griswold. 
He was, without doubt, or hesitation, decidedly 
in favor of dissolving the Union, and estab- 
lishing a Northern Confederacy.'' 

This "treasonable convention" — as John 
Quincy Adams calls it — representing, by the 
amplest Legislative authority, the Five New 
England States (Maine was not a State then), 
did not believe the times quite ripe for their 
movement, and so adjourned to meet in Bos- 
ton, on June, 181 5, to hear the report of its 
commissioners who had been sent with com- 
plaints to Washington. The expected report 
didn't come. The re-assembling never hap- 
pened. Peace put an end to the project. 
Otherwise the first secession ordinance would 
have been put to the credit of Massachusetts, 
and not of South Carolina ! 

This same spirit prevailed and showed itself 
in the North, again and again without rebuke. 



64 Lee and His Cause 

On January 24, 1842, John Quincy Adams and 
Joshua R. Giddings presented petitions from 
citizens of Massachusetts and Ohio, asking 
Congress to take steps toward the peaceable 
dissolution of the Union. These petitions 
were stoutly opposed by Mr. Gilmore of Vir- 
ginia, and Mr. Marshall of Kentucky, who 
brought in resolutions censuring Mr. Adams 
for presenting them; but after two long- 
weeks of sharp discussion, the House by a 
big majority laid on the table the resolutions, 
thus showing that the movers had done no 
wrong and the petitioners asked nothing 
treasonable or unlawful. Mr. Adams was a 
bold defender of the right of secession. In a 
speech made in 1839, before the New York 
Historical Society, among other such state- 
ments is this — ''Under these limitations have 
the people of each State in the Union a right to 
secede from the Confederated Union itself." 
Did Messrs. Davis, Toombs, Rhett or Yancey 
ever say mioore? 

The admission of Texas was claimed to fully 
justify disunion. The acquisition of Florida 
also, while less resisted, ''resulted in our get- 
ting less territory from Spain than she was 



Lee and His Cause 65 

ready to yield, just to avoid irritating New 
England." The chronic trouble was a terri- 
torial one — to put it in the words of George 
Bancroft, a Massachusetts man, a graduate of 
Harvard, the most laborious and elaborate his- 
torian of our country, a man who spent fifty 
years upon his ponderous volumes — the trouble 
was — "An ineradicable dread of the coming 
power of the Southwest lurked in New Eng- 
land, especially in Massachusetts." Only the 
treaty of peace with old England, signed at 
Ghent by Henry Clay in 18 14, prevented the 
formation of a New England Confederacy 
Avith its Capital at Boston. Believe me, there 
were men once who dqDlored the peace made 
at Ghent ! 

Again in 1844, Charles F. Adams intro- 
duced in the Massachusetts Legislature a reso- 
lution almost the same as that of Mr. Quincy 
in 181 1, and said — "Massachusetts is deter- 
mined to submit to undelegated powers in no 
body of men on earth, and the project of 
the annexation of Texas, unless arrested upon 
the threshold, may tend to drive these States 
into a dissolution of the Union." Adopted. 
Of such utterances the half has ne'er been told ! 
ne'er been told ! 



(^ Lee and His Cause 

Four years before the Charleston Conven- 
tion met to dissolve the bond that connected 
South Carolina with the other States, a seces- 
sion convention sat in Worcester, Massachu- 
setts, and on January 15, 1857, ''Resolved, 
That the sooner the separation takes place, the 
more peaceable it will be ; but that peace or war 
is a secondary consideration. Slavery must be 
conquered; peaceably if we can, forcibly if we 
must." Henry Ward Beecher is recorded as 
saying — "It will be an advantage for the South 
to go off." In celebrating the glorious Fourth, 
July, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison "publicly 
burned a copy of the United States Constitu- 
tion with the words — the Union must be 

DISSOLVED.''^ 

Horace Greeley's great paper, the Nevo York 
Tribune, in an editorial of November 9th, i860, 
said — "If the Cotton States shall decide that 
they can do better out of the Union than in it, 
we insist on letting them go in peace. The 
right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but 
it exists nevertheless. Whenever a consider- 
able section of our Union shall deliberately re- 
solve to go out, we shall resist all coercive 
measures designed to keep it in. We hope 



Lee and His Cause 67 

never to live in a Republic where one section 
is pinned to the residue by bayonets." 

The next year in New Bedford, Massachu- 
setts, the most rabid of politicians, — Wendel 
Phillips, declared — ^The States that think their 
peculiar institutions require a separate govern- 
ment have a right to decide that question with- 
out appealing to you or me." Alas! for his 
logic. For long years after this, he supported 
every bloody attempt of government to deny to 
eleven sovereign States the very right that he 
himself had allowed. The number and variety 
of such sayings is about endless, and as I am 
not making a book, but only a speech, I desist. 

The right to secede, so freely asserted, and 
so strongly held by the North, was not pro- 
hibited by any word of the Constitution. In 
the "Articles of Confederation" it had been 
plainly denied. The last sentence in that docu- 
ment is this — "That this Union be perpetual!'' 
But the Constitution has no such declaration. 
The duration of the Union was left by its au- 
thors to the future free choice of the States that 
had voluntarily entered it. The limitations of 
the Constitution bear chiefly upon the powers of 
the Federal Government. Consider the Tenth 
Amendment — "The powers not delegated to 



68 Lee and His Cause 

the United States by the Constitution, nor pro- 
hibited by it to the States, are reserved to the 
States, respectively, or to the people." Now, 
since the power to secede isn't denied by the 
Constitution to the States ; and since the power 
to coerce a State is nowhere delegated to the 
Federal Government; it follows that its exer- 
cise was optional and perfectly lawful. The 
Declaration of Independence had been made 
and signed by the colonies acting separately 
and as sovereign powers, not by the people as 
a whole, nor by a majority of the whole 
people." Their independence had been ac- 
knowledged by Great Britain, not as the 
independence of a new ''nation," but as the 
freedom of separate and sovereign States, 
each receiving recognition by her colonial 
name; and the Constitution had been framed, 
not by ''a mixed multitude," or a sectional 
majority, or by a popular vote of citizens of all 
the States, but by a vote of the States, as such, 
each State casting one vote; and this action of 
each State was later ratified in her own con- 
vention of her own delegates, and of her own 
free will. The freedom of the South came 
not by the grace of Yankee Doodle, but by 
the proclamation of King George, the Third, 



Lee and His Cause 69 



and he granted it to Virginia — not to an 
"entire nation," but severally, to each State — 
to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and the 
others. 

Knowing that these States, thus "united," 
were free and sovereign when they were still 
separate colonies, when they won their inde- 
pendence, when they adopted severally and 
separately the Constitution, our statesmen 
supposed that they were still as legally and 
morally free to go out, as they had been 
to come in; and that it lay in their own 
breasts to abide in, or depart from, the Union. 
That they had enslaved themselves when they 
ratified the Constitution, was not dreamed of; 
that they had made unconsciously a great 
governmental machine of higher power than 
they themselves possessed, Avould have been 
scouted as nonsense, since the creature cannot 
be greater than its creator! If the power to 
do doesn't imply the power to undo^ they 
believed it did. That the Federal Govern- 
ment, the servant of all, of only delegated 
powers, for specific purposes, had become the 
sole sovereign, with inherent rights, superior 
to those of the States that gave it being, would 
have seemed to them absurd and impossible! 



70 Lee and His Cause 

The Declaration of Independence was not 
made by a Nation, or by a Union, but by 
thirteen separate and sovereign colonies. For- 
eign powers — France, in 1778, Sweden in 
1783, and the Netherlands, in 1782 — had 
entered into treaties with them, not as one 
"national government," but with each as a 
sovereign State. And Great Britain did not 
acknowledge their independence as a "united 
people," but as politically distinct and sover- 
eign States, designating each by her chosen 
name. Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, said 
in the Convention of 1787: "Foreign States 
have made treaties with us as confederated 
States, and not as a National Government." 
Now, if these States, so united, had that 
character when they declared their independ- 
ence, when they won their freedom, when they 
severally ratified their Constitution, pray when, 
and how did they lose it? They not only had 
this sovereignty, but were zealous to keep it. 
When in their Conventions they agreed to 
unite as States, they "reserved" to themselves 
all rights and powers not delegated to the 
Federal Government; and some asserted in 
plain terms the right to resume them, when- 
ever their welfare called for it. This was the 



Lee and His Cause 71 

saving clause of the ratification of the Consti- 
tution by Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, 
Rhode Island, New Hampshire, North and 
South Carolina and Massachusetts. 

The last named, in her State Constitution, 
has embalmed for coming ages a declaration of 
her immutable faith in her own inviolable and 
supreme sovereignty worthy of world-wide 
fame. It runs as follows — "The people of 
this Commonwealth have the sole and exclusive 
right of governing themselves as a free, 
sovereign and independent State; and do, and 
shall forever hereafter exercise and enjoy every 
power and jurisdiction and right which is not, 
nor may not hereafter be, by them, expressly 
delegated to the United States." "O ! Jew, 
I thank thee for that word!" No clearer, 
sounder political doctrine was ever sent forth 
by man: and this was ordained and published 
in Massachusetts, A. D. 1792, five years after 
her ratification of our Federal compact. In 
the Union she is still asserting sovereign and 
independent statehood ! 

The thought of an actual secession from the 
Union by an aggrieved State may not have had 
any large place in the minds of those who made 
our Constitution, but the idea of failure in duty' 



y2 Lee and His Cause 

and of nullification of law did occur to some 
persons and a proposal to give Congress the 
power '% call forth the force of the Union 
against any member of it failing to fulfill its 
duty" was actually made and voted dozmi. Mr. 
Madison moved to postpone the question. This 
was agreed to by a unanimous vote, and the 
matter never came up again. George Mason, 
(whom Thomas Jefferson said, was the wisest 
man thac he ever knew), speaking of the use of 
force, asked; — ''Will not the citizens of the 
invaded State assist one another, until they rise 
up as one man and shake off the Union alto- 
gether?" In the Convention of New York, 
Alexander Hamilton declared : ''To coerce the 
State is one of the maddest projects that was 
ever devised. What picture does this idea 
present to our view? A complying State at 
war with a non-complying State : Congress 
marching the troops of one State into the 
bosom of another ! Here is a nation at war 
with itself! Can any reasonable man be well 
disposed toward a government which makes 
war and carnage the only means of supporting 
itself? A government that can exist only by 
the sword ? But can we believe that one State 
will ever suffer itself to be used as an instru- 



Lee and His Cause 73 

ment of coercion? The thing is a dream! It 
is impossible!" Alas! In 1861, this dreadful 
dream became an awful reality. 

Long before May 14, 1787, the date of 
the Convention that framed our Federal Con- 
stitution, and in that Convention, as well, and 
ever since it, there were, and there are still, 
two governmental ideas and two opposing 
political parties supporting them. At different 
times, these have had different names, leaders, 
motives, methods and ends to be gained, which 
of course led to the adoption of different poli- 
cies according to the different purposes to be 
served. Alexander Hamilton was the gifted 
leader of one of these parties, and Thomas 
Jefferson was the sagacious statesman repre- 
senting the other. The first party favored the 
establishment of a strong, centralized, national. 
Federal Government. The second as sincerely 
contended for the sovereignty of the States, 
which were soon to become politically united. 
With the first, the Union was to have superior 
strength and real supremacy. With the 
second, the States were to retain and exercise 
their free, independent and sovereign rights, 
the power of local self-government. They 
were to remain, as before, each one politically 



74 Lee and His Cause 

unhampered in the control of her own domestic 
concerns, as free within the league, as she had 
been without it, except as to certain powers 
specified and delegated in the compact to the 
Federal Government for the common welfare. 
From the earliest times there had existed 
among the States a widespread distrust of 
government and fear of oppression from it, 
engendered, it may be, by colonial experience 
of British tyranny. In the smaller States, this 
grew later into a deep dread of interference by 
the more powerful States, and great care- 
fulness to guard against it is abundantly 
manifest. The constitutional provision of 
equal power in the Senate for every State is 
evidently due to this natural feeling. This 
fear increased as legislation and experience in 
the Union developed diverse interests and sec- 
tional antipathies. Conflict was natural and 
seemed unavoidable. Geographical position, 
soil, climate, pursuits, domestic habits and 
environment, religious notions and political 
institutions, social antecedents and racial 
affinities, commercial interests and foreign 
immigration — all these combined to bring 
forth and foster the mutual dread, aversion 
and jealousy which ended in our sectional 



Lee and His Cause 75 

struggle — our fratricidal war. The North 
was most dependent upon trade and commerce, 
fisheries, mills, mines and manufactories. The 
South was most interested in cattle, sheep, hogs, 
horses, grain, rice, sugar, cotton, indigo, tobacco 
and other farm products. It was rural in taste, 
habit, interest, ever}^hing. The North was 
urban, given to trading and making things, to 
moving and money getting. Our people loved 
nature and cultivated the soil, raised horses, 
followed the dogs, handled the guns, founded 
families, and lived like lords, whether in cabins 
or manor-houses, and called these abodes — 
"home-sweet home." In the North, a mixed 
multitude united in trades-union, guilds and 
lodges; in the South, a native, homogeneous 
people, widely separated, and personally, inde- 
pendent, lived largely alone, and each as he 
liked. One had negro slaves and cared kindly 
for them : the other sold him those slaves, and 
despised and denounced slavery! — having 
found it quite unprofitable ! 

These local and constitutional differences 
produced diverse domestic, social and indus- 
trial demands : and these led to legislation 
intended to protect and promote the welfare of 
each section. And so, a political struggle was 



"j^ Lee and His Cause 

engendered. The questions of territorial ex- 
pansion, protective tariffs, and African servi- 
tude brought on at length the "irrepressible 
conflict." Upon both sides it was a struggle 
for power — 'The balance of power" — to be 
wielded for local, material interests, to pre- 
serve domestic peace and secure sectional 
glory. The North fought for supremacy. The 
South contended for the Constitution which 
was her only hope of salvation. 

Both sections claimed support in the Con- 
stitution. The North contended that the 
Federal Government was made by "the people 
of the United States;" that the adoption of 
our Constitution merged the States into a 
"Nation/^ and gave to its Congress supreme 
power. Daniel Webster said : "The Constitu- 
tion itself, in its very front, declares, that it 
was ordained and established by the people of 
the United States in the aggregate." He 
refers to the "Preamble," hut it declares no 
such thing! He put in just what "the Fathers" 
had carefully left out of it, viz. ''in the ag- 
gregate/' True, it says. "We, the people of 
the United States, in order to form a more 
perfect union, etc." But this "people" is the 
people composing the several States, and not 



Lee and His Cause yy 

the whole mass of citizens Hving in all the 
geographical extent of the Union. The South 
holds that the Constitution is a compact made 
by free and sovereign States, each one of whom 
approved it by her own individual vote; that 
this contract was ratified later by the people 
of each State, in her Convention assembled, 
and that in so doing no State surrendered her 
rights or power of self-government, except 
as to such powers as were specified in the docu- 
ment, and which were granted by the framers 
of it to the Federal Agent, for the defense, 
welfare and happiness of all the States. 

There arose, of course, the question of 
origin and intention of the Constitution itself. 
How, and by whom, was it made, and what is 
its meaning? History alone can answer, and 
it does answer, and its answer is an ample, 
clear, complete vindication of the political ac- 
tion of our people, and of their struggle to 
maintain it on a thousand bloody fields. 

When the great Convention at Philadelphia 
had ended its immortal work, the original docu- 
ment was entrusted to a ''Committee on Style," 
that the is should be dotted, and the ^'^y crossed ; 
that the grammar and rhetoric should be per- 
fected, in order that the mind of the makers 



78 Lee and His Cause 

should be exactly expressed. Now, in review- 
ing the "Preamble/' a verbal difficulty came to 
mind. As it was first drawn, the Preamble 
contained the name of every State that had 
engaged in its construction; but according to 
its express terms, the Constitution needed the 
consent of only nine States for its adoption, 
and to give it legal operative force : and hence 
the Committee naturally and rightly judged 
that the Preamble should contain only the 
names of those States which would sanction 
and accept the paper. It seemed to the Com- 
mittee grossly improper to insert in the com- 
pact the names of parties that might not after- 
wards agree to it. But which of the Thirteen 
would agree to it? No human being could 
foresee. So, rather than risk a guess, and prob- 
ably miss some State which would ratify the 
work, and rather than leave an ugly and unex- 
plained blank in the head-piece of the instru- 
ment, the Committee decided to substitute for 
the several names of States the phrase — ''JVe^ 
the people of the United States, &c.," leaving to 
time and to the action of the States, to add the 
proper signatures belonging thereto. If the 
Fathers of the Republic had been prophets as 
well as patriots, they would have surely said — 



Lee and His Cause 79 

''We, the States of America, do ordain, &c, 
&c." Alas! they were not inspired. Having 
done its work, the Committee laid it before the 
House, on September the twelfth, 1787, and it 
was adopted without dissent. The rough ori- 
ginal of the Preamble, containing the name of 
every State, had been already unanimously ap- 
proved, on August the sixth, and for over a 
month had remained unaltered ; now, is it at all 
probable that the little verbal change made in 
one phrase could have been accepted by the Con- 
vention without dispute or division, if it was to 
work the iMonstrous Machine imagined by Mr. 
Webster? Had such an effect been even sus- 
pected at the time it would have created con- 
sternation, and the record of it would remain. 
I can find in the account no resistance what- 
ever. Nor can I believe that, at the last 
moment, the wicked attempt was made to 
destroy the liberty of the States by fusing into 
one political mass Thirteen separate Sovereign- 
ties which for four months had fought for 
their inherent political rights. If such action 
could have transformed these States into a 
"Nation," and if that was done, pray how 
came the trick to be turned without a word of 
protest from the mighty men who from the first 



8o Lee and His Cause 

had feared such a fate? How could so many 
earnest, eloquent men sit in solemn silence and 
witness and consent to the death of State 
Sovereignty? Of course, they never did it. No 
such attempt was ever allowed or thought of. 

The reason for the use of the phrase — ''We, 
the people of the United States" — was just this 
— Nine States could form the compact, and put 
into full force the Constitution; but no body 
could tell w^hich nine would do so. The fram- 
ers, therefore, could consistently name no 
State : but rather than leave a suspicious blank 
on the fair face of the immortal Document, 
they met the demand by using the words — 
''We, the people of the United States'' the 
sense being, — we, the people of such States as 
shall hereafter ratify and ordain it. Nothing 
else could have been done. How could the 
Convention have left in the Preamble the name 
of Rhode Island, for example, when she had no 
representative in the Convention Hall, and 
when its wonderful work did not find accept- 
ance with that cautious little Commonwealth 
for several anxious years, and only then by the 
very slim majority of two votes out of sixty- 
six that w!ere cast? Even New York, urged 
on by the powerful influence of Alexander 



Lee and His Cause 8i 

Hamilton, assented by a majority of only three 
votes — thirty to twenty-seven. The phrase is 
explained and justified by every circumstance 
in the case, except to such men as are wilfully 
blind. But Oh ! what things are zvords. "Out 
of one foolish word may start a thousand dag- 
g'ers," says Jeremy Bentham. Ah! these few 
fateful words — what "woes unnumbered" 
sprang from them ! 

"But words are things and a small drop of ink, 

Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces 
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think." 

So Byron thought and wrote ! Should we not 
think? It is claimed that the adoption of 
the Constitution made of us a consolidated 
"Nation." This is clearly disproved both by 
the mode of its ratification and the specified 
condition upon which it was to become opera- 
tive. It must be ratified by the peoples of the 
States, and it required nine such ratifications to 
give it validity among them. If we are, or 
ever were, "one people" en masse, then Ave 
must have been made so by a majority vote 
of the whole population. And that vote 
must have overruled any minority, no matter 



82 Lee and His Cause 

where cast or by whom counted. Did such 
election ever occur? Where, when, how, and 
by what means and authority was any such 
vote ever taken? The only action ever had in 
reference to the Constitution was the action of 
the States^ each in her own time, and place, and 
manner, and in words of her own choosing, 
and by delegates of her own selection. If that 
wasn't the modus operandi of our making as 
these "United States," let those who know 
some other declare it. If the majority of the 
entire population might, and did, establish our 
Federal Government over the whole land, why 
was the assent of only "nine States" made nec- 
essary to its ordination and operation? And 
why did George Mason, William Grayson and 
Patrick Henry resist so stoutly in the Virginia 
Convention its ratification even after the nec- 
essary "nine" had approved it? According to 
the theory. of Webster, Story, Motley, Bancroft, 
Everett and Curtis, the Constitution was even 
then the law in Virginia, and it was treasonable 
conduct to oppose it, for it had been already 
ratified by Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jer- 
sey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, 
Maryland, South Carolina and New Hamp- 
shire, while the Virginians were yet weighing 



Lee and His Cause 83 

it in the balance of liberty. Who are to be 
trusted as expounders of the Constitution, the 
men who made it, or those who called them- 
selves to the task of interpretation sixty years 
afterwards? Mr. Madison made this reply to 
Patrick Henry when he stood in opposition to 
Virginia's adoption of it because of this 
very Preamble: "Who are parties to the 
Constitution? The people' — but not the 
people as composing one great body, but the 
people as composing thirteen sovereignties: 
were it a consolidated government, the assent 
of a majority of the people would be suffi- 
cient for its establishment, and as a ma- 
jority have adopted it already, the remain- 
ing States would be bound by the acts of 
the majority, even if they unanimously repro- 
bated it: were it such a government, it would 
be now binding upon the people of this State, 
without their having had the privilege of delib- 
erating upon it; but sir, no State is bound by 
it, as it is, without its own consent." And 
"Light-Horse Harry" Lee, in the same strain 
replied, — "The Constitution is now submitted 
to the people of Virginia. If we do not adopt 
it, it will always be null and void as to us." 
This is quite conclusive. This at once silenced 



84 Lee and His Cause 

Henry and Mason and Grayson. It doesn't 
leave a grain of sand for Webster or Motley or 
Story or Everett or Bancroft or Curtis to stand 
on. 

Is our Government national, or is it a 
co-partnership of equal and sovereign States? 
''That is the question/' Having heard Web- 
ster, may v^e not nov^ listen to Washington? 
General Washington, our own glorious Wash- 
ington, the President of the Philadelphia Con- 
vention and the First Chief Magistrate of our 
Union should surely have known the nature of 
the government that he was to administer and 
that he had helped to make. In writing to 
Count Rochambeau, on January 8, 1788, he 
says: *The Constitution is to be submitted 
to conventions chosen by the people in the sev- 
eral States and by them approved or rejected." 
Who knew, Washington or Webster? Gen- 
eral Lafayette also' had fromi Washington 
on April 28, 1788, this line— 'T/^^ people of 
the several States (not of the entire country, 
nor "in the aggregate") retain everything they 
do not by express terms, give up." Did they 
ever in express terms, or otherwise, give up 
their sovereignty, or their right to rule and reg- 
ulate their own internal affairs ? NEVER ! 



Lee and His Cause 85 

A fact very significant of the nature of our 
government is recorded by Dr. J. L. M. Curry, 
to wit : "At one time in the progress of fram- 
ing the Constitution, the words — 'National 
Government' were used twenty-six times in a 
committee report. Next day Mr. Ellsworth of 
Connecticut moved to strike out the words, 
'National Government' and to use the words 
— 'Government of United States.' This was 
unanimously agreed to, and the term 'National' 
forever disappeared from our great Charter; 
leaving us, beyond all doubt, a Government 
that is Federal and not National." 

The theory of the centralizationists was stub- 
bornly advocated by Webster, and later by 
Story, Everett, Bancroft, Motley and others, 
but Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Boston poli- 
tician and orator, a Harvard graduate, a Sen- 
ator from Massachusetts, biographer of Alex- 
ander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, editor of the 
North American Review and historian-at- 
large, confesses that — "It was probably neces- 
sary, at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so, 
to argue that the Constitution, at the outset, 
was not a contract between the States, but a 
National instrument. Unfortunately the facts 
were against him. When the Constitution was 



86 Lee and His Cause 

adopted by the votes of the States at Philadel- 
phia, and accepted by the votes of States in 
popular conventions, it is safe to say that there 
was not a man in the country from Washing- 
ton and Hamilton on the one side, to George 
Clinton and George Mason on the other, who 
regarded the new system as anything but an 
experiment entered upon by the States, and 
from zvhich each and every State had the right 
peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very 
likely to be exercised." Certainly this conclu- 
sion is one from which Mr. Lodge can never 
be dislodged; for facts are more than "stub- 
born" — they are eternal ! 

Mr. Webster and Justice Joseph Story both 
of the same loyal State virtually admit that if 
our Constitution be a compact between the 
States, the States would have the right to 
withdraw from it at pleasure; "even" says 
Webster (in his debate with Calhoun in 1833), 
"Although it might be one of its stipulations 
that it should be perpetual." To prove the 
right of secession then according to this great 
interpreter of the Constitution, it is only nec- 
essary to establish the fact that the Constitu- 
tion is a ''Compact.'' A single sentence from 
the act of ratification by Massachusetts of the 



Lee and His Cause 87 

Federal Constitution is quite conclusive. She 
"acknowledges with grateful hearts the good- 
ness of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, in 
affording the people of the United States the 
opportunity deliberately and peaceably, with- 
out fraud or surprise, of entering into an 
explicit and solemn compact with each other, 
&c." This testimony of the Massachusetts 
Senator, Lodge, and of the Bay State itself, 
sitting in deliberate and peaceful counsel is 
heavy evidence against Daniel, "the great 
expounder;" but it is positively shocking to see 
him refute himself! In 1819, December 15, he 
presented in the United States Congress a 
Memorial from citizens of Boston, endorsed by 
himself as chairman of the Committee, in 
which he speaks of the States as enjoying ''the 
exclusive possession of sovereignty over their 
own territory." He calls the United States — 
"the American Confederacy." He says, "The 
only parties to the Constitution, contemplated 
by it originally, were the Thirteen Confeder- 
ated States/' 

In his famous speech at Capon Springs, 
Virginia, delivered over thirty years later, 
Webster declared: "I have not hesitated to 
say, and I repeat, that, if the Northern States 



88 Lee and His Cause 

refuse wilfully and deliberately, to carry into 
effect that part of the Constitution which 
respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and 
Congress provide no remedy, the South zuould 
be no longer hound to observe the Compact. A 
bargain cannot be broken on one side and still 
bind the other side." Had Webster lived but 
ten years longer, he must have become a seces- 
sionist, or shown himself very inconsistent 
indeed. If he could rise from the dead, and 
confront his Capon Springs speech, he would 
scarcely deny, at any rate, ''the compact con- 
tained in it. ''But neither will they be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead." 

That Alexander Hamilton was a pretty good 
believer in strong government was never ques- 
tioned. Yet he clearly recognized the States 
as sovereign parties to the contract. In the 
''Federalist," he writes — "Every Constitution 
for the United States must inevitably consist 
of a great variety of particulars, in which 
thirteen independent States are to be accommo- 
dated in their interests or opinions of interest. 
Hence the necessity of moulding and arrang- 
ing all the particulars, which are to compose 
the whole, in such a manner as to satisfy all the 
parties to the compact." Are not these parties, 



Lee and His Cause 89 

*The Thirteen Independent States?" Again, 
he calls the new Union, "The Confederacy" — 
himself using capitals for emphasis. 

But why record men's names to determine a 
point that is plainly established by the Docu- 
ment itself? The Vllth Article should end all 
controvers}^ "The ratification of the conven- 
tions of nine States shall be sufficient for the 
establishment of this Constitution between the 
States so ratifying the same." Not between 
the inhabitants of all the territory — not be- 
tween the various communities or municipali- 
ties of this continent ; but ''between the States 
so ratifying." The States are the parties, and 
it is their ratification that ''establishes" the 
compact. 

To show that the true doctrine is absolutely 
invulnerable, and positively indubitable, I add 
just one more fact of record — in the Philadel- 
phia Convention, on July 23, 1787, it was Gou- 
verneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, who "moved 
that the reference of the plan (of Constitution) 
be made to one General Convention, chosen 
and authorized by the people, to consider, 
amend and establish the same." Oh ! what a 
time that was for a Webster ! He might have 
won immortality by seconding the motion. 



90 Lee and His Cause 

Of all human history, that was the fateful hour 
in which to advocate and ordain a government 
for the mass, and by the mass. But — The 
Convention didn't want that. They wouldn't 
have it, and no man came to the rescue. Mr. 
Morris' proposal did not reach a vote. The 
record is, ''not seconded/' and "the Father of 
the Constitution," Mr. Madison, makes the 
record. And he too speaks of the New Union 
as ''Confederated States." Madison! Think 
of it ! and Morris of Pennsylvania ! 

In view of these facts and declarations by 
the authors of the Constitution, how strange 
and absurd is Mr. Lincoln's theory of March 4, 
1 86 1 that, ''The Union is older than any of the 
States, and, in fact, it created them as States." 
How could the adoption of the Constitution 
create States, when according to the document 
itself, nine States, acting as such, must first 
accept it to give it any legal force? Consist- 
ency here would require the "States" to enact 
the Constitution, which must give them being, 
before they themselves could have existence! ! 

The question was once asked Mr. Lincoln — 
"Why not let the South go?" He exclaimed — 
"Let the South go ! Where then shall we get 
our revenue?" The President knew far more 



Lee and His Cause 91 

of the practical benefits of our tax and tariff 
systems than of the fundamental principles of 
the Federal government. 

Mr. Lincoln should certainly have credit for 
his clear understanding of one point, and for 
his perfectly positive and distinct avowal that 
he would not act contrary to his convictions in 
regard to it. In passing, I wish to accord him 
this honor. I refer to his statement in his first 
inaugural address, concerning his position 
upon the slave question. He said, "I have no 
purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with 
the institution of slavery in the States where it 
exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do 
so, and I have no inclination to do so." 
Whether Lincoln was in this sincere, or simply 
shrewd, can not, of course, be known until all 
hearts are made manifest. The thing that we 
do know is — within about eighteen months, he 
emancipated by his own proclamation all the 
slaves living in the seceded States ! As a "war 
measure" it w^as not unwise; as regards the 
Constitution, it was utterly without reason or 
right. He himself said, 'T have no lawful 
right to interfere with the institution of 
slavery." Then how came he to be clothed 
with the lawful right to do it, on or before 



92 Lee and His Cause 

''September 22nd, 1862;" and who gave it to 
him ? Echo answers — Who ? Two bilHon of 
dollars' worth of slaves were made free without 
compensation or lawful right, according to the 
''Encyclopedia of the United States History," 
by Harper Bros., 1902. 

Slavery was not the cause of the war, "any 
more than the tax on tea was the cause of the 
American revolution;" but it was the occasion 
of secession, for it was the matter that the 
Abolitionists could never let alone. Some 
seventy years ago, they presented through John 
Ouincy Adams in Congress, in one day, five 
hundred and eleven petitions for the abolition 
of slavery. It had existed from the beginning 
in every colony and was popular in Massachu- 
setts a century before the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. Those pious people had bought 
cargoes of slaves of the Dutch, and had sold 
into bondage their Pequod Indian prisoners ; 
but b3^e the bye, they found it more lucrative to 
trade their gin and rum for black men in 
Africa, and to sell these black cargoes to plant- 
ers in the Carolinas and Georgia, and so it was 
done. The Constitution expressly recognized 
this property, which the Dutch in 1619, and 
later the English and the Puritans, had sold us, 



Lee and His Cause 93 

and provided for the safe return of all fugitives 
to the State from which they had fled. (Arti- 
cle IV, Section 2.) New England, moreover, 
had a fugitive slave law in 1643; o^ ^45 y^a-i's 
before the Federal Constitution was adopted. 
But returning slaves to her soil is one thing; 
and her returning them to iis is quite another 
thing ! 

Bad as Southern slavery may have been, it 
was our inheritance. Mr. R. E. Lee, Jr., well 
says — "Slavery was the South' s calamity and 
not her crime." It descended upon us from 
the Pilgrim Fathers and our old English an- 
cestors, and in spite of its evils, it was the 
mildest form of servitude ever found among 
men. I shall not apologize for the dead insti- 
tution. I cannot defend its Dutch promoters, 
or New England dealers, but I will say that, it 
did for the negro far more than any other 
labor system had ever done for any other 
savage since the world was ! It gave him soap 
and made him wash. It redeemed him from 
barbarism and idolatry, made him human, gave 
him a home and told him of Heaven. It 
clothed and fed him. It protected him in his 
ignorance, fostered him in infancy, trained him 
in youth, cared for him in sickness, sheltered 



94 Lee and His Cause 

and comforted him in old age, and at death 
gave him Christian burial. It restrained his 
passions, reformed his indolent, indecent habits, 
created his conscience, inspired his faith and 
filled him with hope. It tolerated no idleness, 
insolence, intemperance, disorder or lawless- 
ness. It made no paupers, or beggars, or 
tramps, or rapists of women and children, 
turned out of home no widows, orphans, or 
worn-out parents. It promoted peace, quiet- 
ness and good government. It trained black 
men and women for useful living as no indus- 
trial schools have ever done before or since, 
and did it without expense or demoralization of 
master or servant ! State laws, with regard for 
social standing and self-interest, all combined 
to prevent cruel treatment of these bond serv- 
ants, and, indeed, rendered it quite rare; the 
idle, insolent and vicious alone feeling the lash. 
The negro who did his work even moderately 
well and behaved himself, did not lack food or 
fire, or friends, or home, or clothes, or medi- 
cine or the protection of law. He had baker 
and butcher, tailor and shoemaker, doctor and 
preacher, without money and without price. 
The master was no monster. The servant was 
no terror. And lighter labor seldom obtained 



Lee and His Cause 95 

as great comforts. The spirit, and example, 
and discipline of Mistress and Master — not to 
mention their humanity, sympathy, kindness, 
refinement and Christian conduct in the planta- 
tion home — operated to create a bond of friend- 
ship in the family — a measure of confidence in 
the owner and a degree of trustworthiness in 
the slave — that was the wonder and admiration 
of all who had knowledge of it. During the 
war, it stood the test of money and power — of 
fire and sword — of offered freedom and 
promised fortune ! 

And it was not considered criminal to be a 
slaveholder even in New England in those 
brave old days. The Puritans both held and 
sold slaves. Dr. Charles Hodge, Princeton 
President, and great teacher of Theology, even 
as late as the year i860, was constrained to 
confess, at the risk of his place and popularity, 
that— 

"When Southern Christians are told that 
they are guilty of a heinous crime, worse than 
piracy, robbery, or murder, because they hold 
slaves, when they know that Christ and his 
Apostles never denounced slave-holding as a 
crime, never called upon men to renounce it as 
a condition of admission to the Church, they 



96 Lee and His Cause 

are shocked and offended without being con- 
vinced. The argument from the conduct of 
Christ and his immediate followers seems to us 
decisive upon the point that slave-holding in 
itself considered is not a crime." 

Rev. George Whitefield, the eloquent Wes- 
leyan Evangelist, held in his orphanage and 
on his farm in Georgia, in 1775, seventy- 
five negroes, which he left by will to the 
Countess of Huntington. Bishop Berkley, of 
Rhode Island, was also a slave-owner. The 
famous preacher and theologian, whose great 
name is still good to conjure with, the mighty 
Jonathan Edwards, with other property, left 
a negro boy. (The "bill of sale" for him may 
still be seen. ) Those pious people bought and 
sold slaves without the least regard to ties of 
blood. And one historian says — "The giving 
away of little negroes as soon as weaned was 
then a common civility, much as it now is for 
one to present his friend with a puppy." A 
Boston paper of that period has this advertise- 
ment, "A likely negro woman about nineteen 
years old and child about sixteen months, to be 
sold together or apart." Such notices were 
^'ery co-mmon. The same author gives other 
advertisements as illustrations of the fact 



Lee and His Cause 97 

that the Puritans preferred to buy rather 
than to rear their slaves. It was a cheaper 
and, well — that is reason enough. This no- 
tice is from the Continental Journal, March 
ist, 1 78 1 — 'To be sold an extraordinary likely 
Negro Wench, seventeen years old. She 
can be warranted to be strong, healthy 
and good natured, has no notion of Freedom, 
has always been used to a Farmer's Kitchen 
and Dairy, and is not known to have any 
failings, but being with child which is the 
only cause of her being sold." Child-slaves 
were sold by the pound, in New England, as 
pigs and other live stock are now. 

A French refugee in ''the cradle of liberty," 
writes home, "You may also here own negroes 
and negresses, and there is not a house in Bos- 
ton, however small may be its means, that has 
not one or two." The State of Georgia gave 
to General Anthony Wayne of the Quaker 
State, a rice plantation in token of appreciation 
of his heroic services during the war with Eng- 
land, and this led the veteran to borrow 
$20,000 "with which to stock his plantation 
with negroes." Why not, if it was right to 
sell Pequot Indian prisoners as slaves, and to 



98 Lee and His Cause 

send them away to the Bermudas, and if the 
Puritans had done that, one hundred and fifty 
in a batch, with the orphan and widow of 
PhiHp, their mighty Chief, how could it be 
wrong for "Mad Anthony" to buy thirty or 
forty negro field-hands to raise rice in Georgia, 
seeing that they had all been reared as slaves, 
and not like the Indians born freemen? Gen- 
eral Wayne was no better man than General 
Washington, and he had about 300 bond 
slaves, born in his house and bought with his 
money. 

Massachusetts, always aggressive, had done 
much more than send away her aboriginal 
American freemen to be sold into slavery. 
She was the pioneer for all who penetrated the 
African jungle to capture and transport as 
slaves to free America the native children of 
the dark Continent. One of the first ships that 
she ever launched and employed in this busi- 
ness was christened, ''Desire" — a name ex- 
pressing well the colonial feeling for the uplift 
of a degraded race, and — for the revenue aris- 
ing therefrom ! This philanthropic adventure, 
this infant industry, required no protective 
tariff or subsidy for its encouragement. It 
flourished from the first, for it had the prayers 



Lee and His Cause 99 

of the saints and "the Colony was the principal 
in the business." At the start, the stolen 
negroes were sold in the West Indies, but later 
along all our Southern coast line. New York 
shared honors and profits with New Eng- 
land in thus doing good to the "brother 
in black," and they (so says their his- 
torian) "practically monopolized the traffic for 
many years." A hundred years later, when 
experience had shown slavery to be unprofita- 
ble in the North, and that free negroes were a 
"dead-weight" and nuisance among them, idle, 
improvident and vicious, we can see a strong 
antipathy developing for everything connected 
with slavery. Legislation now turned against 
it, and State by State, it was outlawed. The 
poor negro became himself an object of dis- 
gust, suspicion and petty persecution. There 
was scant room for him. In Connecticut, Miss 
Prudence Crandall's negro girls' school was 
mobbed, and so damaged that she had to give 
it up. The Legislature, on May 24, 1833, 
passed a "black law" by which all such Chris- 
tian efforts were "practically prohibited." The 
ringing of bells and firing of cannons gave vent 
to the public approbation. The godly lady- 
teacher who had been locked up in prison was 



loo Lee and His Cause 

released, but her house was set on fire, and the 
opposition so strongly shown that she aban- 
doned her educational efforts. Two years 
earlier, a negro male school in New Haven had 
encountered the same fate. In New Hamp- 
shire, "Noyes Academy" for negroes was 
closed out, because ''the respectable people of 
the town were so incensed" that they pulled 
down the house. No "common schools" would 
admit colored children. All public conveyances 
were closed against them. On steamers and 
sail-boats they had to go as steerage or deck- 
passengers, or not go at all. The '7^"^ Crow" 
apartment was found even in God's house, 
and Sambo and Dinah must take back-seats. 
In Boston, 'The cradle of Liberty," an Ethio- 
])ian pew-holder had his own pew-door nailed 
fast to keep him out for the awful crime of fail- 
ing to "change his skin." In the great church 
of Dr. Storrs, no pew-deed might be made ex- 
cept "to respectable white persons." The color 
line was drawn as distinctly in Boston as in 
Neiw Orleans ! and drawn in His house with 
whom there is "no respect of persons !" 

But with this spreading and deepening aver- 
sion for the person and presence of the negro, 



Lee and His Cause loi 

strange as it certainly is, there began to come 
a lot of legislation in favor of his freedom. 
Whether this was due to sympathy with Sambo, 
or to antipathy for his master, or both, "depo- 
nent saith not." To free the other man's 
slave may have seemed easier to the brother 
who had sold his own, and also more obliga- 
tory. In the year 1808, the American traffic 
in slaves from foreign shores ceased by legal 
limitation, and any person caught engaged in it 
was to be deemed guilty of piracy. In 1820, 
in the adoption of the Missouri compromise, 
the geographical extension of slavery beyond 
36° 30', north latitude, wias prohibited. In 
Virginia's Convention of 1830, but few votes 
were lacking to procure prospective emancipa- 
tion. And many a philanthropist and Christian 
had arranged to free his slaves whenever the 
laws should allow him. Such was the tenor 
of the will of Mrs. Lee's father concerning his 
family servants, and five years after his death, 
in 1863, his executor. General R. E. Lee, sent 
all these dark-skinned dependents through his 
military lines as freedmen and women, at lib- 
erty to go wherever they liked. It is now cer- 
tain, and never denied that slavery would in 



102 Lee and His Cause 

the course of events have been peaceably 
abolished, and with just legal compensation of 
ov^ners, but for the rabid utterances and wicked 
antagonisms excited by the abolition leaders 
throughout the North. 

Dr. Hunter McGuire, the Chief Surgeon of 
General Jackson's Division, has published the 
statement that both Lee and Jackson "were in 
favor of freeing all the slaves in the South," 
and of paying for them after our independence 
had been achieved. He also makes this decla- 
ration — "I know that I am within proper 
bounds when I assert that, there was not one 
soldier in thirty who owned, or ever expected to 
own, a slave." A recent official report de- 
clares that ''more than 80 per cent, of our Con- 
federate soldiers owned no slaves." It is every- 
where known that General Joe Johnston never 
owned a slave, although something of a South- 
ern soldier. And it might as well be known 
that General U. S. Grant did own slaves until 
they were made free by Mr. Lincoln's pro- 
clamation. In the light of such facts how 
supremely absurd does the saying of a North- 
ern historian sound, namely, "Slavery was the 
cause of the war, just as property is the cause 



Lee and His Cause 103 

of robbery." Granting, however, that this 
historian is correct in assigning the motive of 
the robbery, it can scarcely be claimed that 
the South fought so long and so hard for the 
property held by only one in thirty of her gal- 
lant defenders. The historian is clearly an 
ignorant person or a worse character. 

Mr. Webster said, March 7, 1850, "The 
South in my judgment is right and the North 
is wrong." In July, he declared, "The preju- 
dice against the Southern labor system all 
originates in misinformation, false represen- 
tations, and misapprehensions, arising from 
labored efforts made in the last twenty years 
to pervert the public judgment and irritate the 
public feeling." Mr. Webster was Senator 
for Massachusetts. 

In the year 1852, a book called — "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin" — was published by Mrs. Har- 
riett Beecher Stowe of New England. "De- 
signed to illustrate the horrors of African 
slavery," and skillfully constructed so as to 
appeal strongly to the reader's imagination, 
conscience and prejudice, this story had an 
enormous run. In five years, its sales amounted 
to a half million copies. It was "pushed" by 



I04 Lee and His Cause 

every agency known to the trade, the church 
and the Abohtion party. It found credulous 
readers among all classes and in all countries. 
There was in it as much money as morals, and 
the money as well as the morals met in the 
North a long-felt want. The novel later was 
dramatized and made a "piteous spectacle" for 
gaping crowds. Then, of course, actors, art- 
ists, managers, lecturers, reviewers, publishers, 
newspapers, bill-posters, and the like, began to 
hear the cry of the downtrodden children of 
Ham and to feel very keenly the awful crime of 
slave-holding. Tender translators next took 
up the tale of woe and soon its powerful 
pathos was felt throughout Germany, France, 
Italy, Austria, England, Ireland, Scotland — in 
fact, all over Europe, and in Asia, as well as 
throughout the American continents, by means 
of some twenty-odd versions. 

There are some beautiful characters, and 
touching scenes, and wholesome truths in the 
book, and it is aimed at the reader's very heart, 
and that from an unsuspected vantage-ground ; 
but it isn't fairly characteristic of the times or 
the domestic institution of which it treats. Its 
mistakes are due doubtless to ignorance and 



Lee and His Cause 105 

passion and not to evil intention. It has mis- 
statements of fact, law, character, condition 
and sentiment. In general, the negroes were 
not abused, but well treated and contented. 
They cared little for freedom, and not a few of 
them after their emancipation and some resi- 
dence in the North, returned to live and die as 
servants among their own Southern white 
folks. Mr. George Lunt, an eminent Boston 
lawyer, in his ''Origin of the Late War," con- 
fesses that. — ''The negroes were perfectly con- 
tented with their lot, and in general they were 
not only happy in their condition, but proud 
of it." Even Mrs. Stowe's anti-slavery slave- 
owner and hero, Mr. Auguste St. Clair, whilst 
he argues against the institution because of its 
abuses, says, in answer to the question — "But 
why didn't you free your own slaves?" ''They 
zi^ere all zuell satisfied to he as they mere.'' Al- 
ready some States had passed laws to restrain 
and punish negligent and cruel masters. 
Courts were given power to prevent harsh 
treatment and the separation by sale of slave 
families. Many eminent, eloquent and influen- 
tial Churchmen were advocating the repeal of 
such laws as forbade the teaching of slaves to 



io6 Lee and His Cause 

read (which laws had been made in self- 
defense only and to limit somewhat the effect 
of abolition books, tracts and papers circulated 
secretly among our servants.) The Gospel 
was being everywhere freely preached to them : 
hundreds of missions were established: multi- 
plied thousands of humble, honest, happy con- 
verts had been gathered into the Church of 
Christ, many planters were building chapels 
and supporting pastors to minister in spiritual 
things to their faithful and beloved servants. 
All these were notable facts, but they have no 
mention in Mrs. Stowe's famous book: nor 
has that other undeniable and stupendous fact, 
that the poor, degraded Southern slave was 
being so speedily, cheaply, thoroughly and gen- 
erally trained and qualified for the active and 
complete citizenship and rulership with which 
he was to be so soon endowed by Northern 
power and wisdom, and all this through the 
conscientious care and personal example and 
affection of his faithful master and mistress. 
When the war was ended, the Northern people 
endorsed most fully Sambo's fitness for the 
ballot and for Gubernatorial honors and Sena- 
torial seats, but Mrs. Stowe denies to his quon- 



Lee and His Cause 107 

dam teachers their well-earned meed! Shock- 
ing ! Shameful ! 

This Connecticut saint, whilst wilfully igno- 
rant of the Negro himself, and scarcely better 
informed as to the domestic system which she 
sets herself to depict, and as bitterly prejudiced 
against the people among whom she had never 
lived, but was resolved to represent to all man- 
kind, this saint did invent a story of cruelty 
and crime that so admirably suited the anti- 
slavery periodical in which it was first pub- 
lished and so successfully served the political 
party and political purposes for which it was 
conceived and issued as to obtain for her a 
literary immortality. Some books of fiction 
are said to be "founded upon fact." Uncle 
Tom's Cabin hasn't much foundation of that 
sort. It is a mean caricature. It slanders the 
South. Its characters are angels and demons. 
Its title should have been — "The Sins and Sor- 
rows of Our Inter-State Slave Traffic, Duly 
Exaggerated and Highly Colored for Political 
Purposes." Its incidents are quite exceptional, 
its actors are overdone, its situations well nigh 
impossible, its theology is unscriptural, its con- 
clusions erroneous, its consequences calamitous. 



io8 Lee and His Cause 

I was born in the family of a slave-owner and 
grew into manhood in a populous slave State, 
and traveled over and resided in the farther 
South, and yet I have never seen a slave chased 
by bloodhounds or chained or handcuffed or 
branded or starved or scourged or sold at auc- 
tion. I suppose such sights did now and then 
happen, but that they truly represent our do- 
mestic life, I deliberately and positively deny. 

The evil consequences of "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin" can never be fully set forth. If its pur- 
pose had been to inflame human and diabolical 
passions until all regard for truth, justice, 
order, law, love, unity, peace and good will 
should be banished from American breasts — if 
its object had been to bring into open con- 
tempt the laws of the land, the decisions of its 
highest courts, and the sacred compacts of the 
Constitution itself — and all these to overthrow 
the system of domestic servitude in the South — 
Then it was a woeful and wondrous success ! 
The Northern people were wrought into a 
frenzy: The Southern, in feeling at least, bit- 
terly resented the outrage, and all classes came 
to realize that the dreaded end was drawing on 
apace. 



Lee and His Cause 109 

Mrs. Stowe spent much time in Florida dur- 
ing her declining years and became more fully 
accjuainted with her brother in black. She 
found him less desirable than she once thought. 
An intimate friend of 'hers is quoted as saying, 
in her own words, and of her own great 
book, — 'That story had its origin in the brain 
of a romantic girl, fired by the stories told by 
my father and my uncle. / did not knozu the 
negro then^ or it zvould never have been zm'it- 
ten." An able editor and devoted friend of the 
black race, in commenting upon this declara- 
tion, sagely remarks — "In the harsh attitude 
of her old age, when she is said to have reached 
a point where she would not allow a negro to 
do anything for her, she was about as far from 
really knowing the negro as in the romance of 
her youth." And he is surely correct. 

But books and songs and sermons and 
prayers were all too tame and slow. The 
popular craze demanded heroic deeds, an 
inspiring example! This prolonged agita- 
tion by abolition authors and orators caused, 
several years subsequently, a strange and 
savage attempt to free the negroes and lead 
them in a concerted uprising against their 



no Lee and His Cause 

unsuspecting masters. This crazy and wicked 
effort was known as the "John Brown 
Raid/'' Brown was a monomaniac and a 
murderer from "Bloody Kansas." He gath- 
ered a band of eighteen Northern ruffians 
white and black, and a sum of money furnished 
by sympathizers in the North amounting to 
about $4,000; his store of arms consisted of 
two hundred rifles, commonly called "Kansas 
Bibles,'' and "Beecher Bibles" (because bought 
by his church) ; two hundred revolvers, and 
nine hundred and fifty long, strong, double- 
edged blades, fastened on the end of hoe- 
handles (made in Ohio) for the use of the 
negroes who should join his crusade — they 
being, of course, unfamiliar with fire-arms. 
With this force and outfit. Brown imagined 
that he could invade Virginia and overthrow 
slavery! At midnight on Sunday, October 
16, 1859, he captured Harper's Ferry, arrested 
sixty of the chief citizens, seized the United 
States Arsenal, and sent forth his conspirators 
to liberate the poor down-trodden darkies. 
Not a negro could be induced to join the band 
of emancipation patriots ; and one poor servant 
was shot for refusing to do so. But the citi- 
zens and troops hastily called out, drove Brown 



Lee and His Cause iii 

and his followers into the village engine-house. 
At the command of the Federal War Office, 
Colonel R. E. Lee, who was on furlough, came 
from his home at Arlington, took charge of the 
defense, and (as is related in his own memo- 
randum) on "Tuesday about sunrise, with 
twelve marines under command of Lieutenant 
Green (accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. 
Stuart) broke in the door of the engine-house, 
secured the robbers and released the prisoners 
unhurt. All the conspirators were killed or 
mortally wounded but four, John Brown, 
Aaron Stevens, Edwin Coppie and Green 
Shields (black). Had the prisoners removed 
to a place of safety and their wounds dressed." 
These brutal and misguided fanatics were 
given able counsel, a fair trial, a Review by the 
Supreme Court, were convicted of the crime of 
murder, and hanged — December 2nd, 1859. 
In the treasonable and murderous assault, five 
men had been slain and nine wounded, but the 
legal execution of the felons occasioned a 
storm of indignation throughout the North. 
Brown was cannonized as ''St. John, the Just/' 
and was placed next to our Lord in the cata- 
logue of martyrs. In many Northern cities 
eloquent eulogies were pronounced, funeral 



112 Lee and His Cause 

dirges sung, church bells tolled, minute guns 
fired, and houses and halls draped in deep 
mourning to express the widespread sympathy 
for the ''martyr who had yielded up his life on 
the altar of human liberty." 

Judge J. S. Black, the great Pennsylvanian, 
says, "They applauded John Brown to the echo 
for a series of the basest murders on record. 
The)^ did not conceal their hostility to the Fed- 
eral and State governments, nor deny their 
enmity to all laws which protected white men. 
The Constitution stood in their wiay, and they 
cursed it bitterly. The Bible was quoted 
against them, and they reviled God, the x\l- 
mighty himself." 

In its immediate, local, personal effects, 
Brown's silly and futile assault upon the State 
of Virginia was scarce worthy of record. No 
servile war was started. No slave was set free. 
No ''Provisional Government" was established. 
No "War Department'' was organized. No 
other armed expedition was sent into the field. 
The red-handed assassin and "Commander-in- 
Chief," John Brown, was quietly hanged by 
the Commonwealth of Virginia, as he richly 
deserved to be for the five murders that he had 
committed in her borders and for several other 



Lee and His Cause 113 

cold-blooded deeds done in Kansas. It was 
the general and profound feeling excited in the 
North by his execution that startled the South- 
ern people like a fire bell at night. It was de- 
clared in public prints and mass meeting ad- 
dresses that the death of the ^'New Saint will 
make the gallows glorious like the Cross.*' 
Such language from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
applauded by the culture and conscience of a 
multitude in Boston, admonished the South in 
tones and terms unmistakable that "the irre- 
pressible conflict" foretold the year before by 
the leader and idol of the party, W. H. Seward 
(later Lincoln's Secretary of State), was now 
on. No man could doubt now that our ''House 
was divided against itself." The whole world 
was advertised that, "the Union could not 
permanently endure half slave and half free." 
And these public demonstrations and inflam- 
matory speeches mightily aided in causing that 
prediction of Lincoln to come to pass. As 
evidence and illustration of the State of the 
public mind at the North, at this time, take the 
testimony of an intelligent and representative 
man w^ho was then studying his profession in 
their midst. He gives this short statement of 
his experience. "I myself saw the demonstra- 



114 Lee and His Cause 

tions of the Northern people on that occasion, 
happening at that time to be living in Philadel- 
phia. It was instantly plain to me that I was 
in an enemy's country. The Southern students 
around me saw it as plainly as I did. It took 
but a dozen sentences to open the eyes of the 
least intelligent. It was only to say — 'Come 
on boys, let's go,' and three hundred of us 
marched over on our own side of the line." It 
must have been a clear case, and a very strong 
feeling, that induced these three hundred 
bright, best men from Dixie to abandon their 
lecture-rooms and turn their backs on profes- 
sional honors, and follow Dr. Hunter McGuire 
to the Southland to escape fromi it. It was 
that feeling — wide spread and ever deepen- 
ing — that brought on the war, not "property" 
in negroes. The seeds of abolitionism sown so 
diligently for thirty years had ripened at last, 
and the harvest must be reaped. It was evi- 
dent that, — "In the North, there is a higher 
law than the Constitution which regulates our 
authority over the domain. Slavery must be 
abolished and we must do it. The times de- 
mand, and we must have, an anti-slavery Con- 
stitution, an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti- 
slavery God!" — That was their slogan! 



Lee and His Cause 115 

This declaration of principles and purposes 
had been strikingly summarized and exempli- 
fied as far back as 1844, by "The American 
Anti-Slavery Society," which boldly cast aside 
the Constitution and denounced it as "a cove- 
nant with death, and an agreement with 
hell." In full accord with this view, and 
faithfully reflecting this feeling, many North- 
ern governors refused to give up upon legal 
requisition the fugitive slaves hidden in their 
States' borders, and Federal marshals were 
often mobbed for arresting runaways in 
Northern cities, whilst fourteen State Legis- 
latures "nullified" the Constitution by passing 
"personal liberty laws." It availed noth- 
ing that these "laws" were declared to be 
unconstitutional again and again by the 
highest Federal courts, and by the Supreme 
Court of the United States. Passion ruled, 
not law. The Supreme Court of the United 
States also decided that under the Constitution, 
we might move into the territories and be pro- 
tected with our property, but Lincoln said, that 
"he didn't care what the Supreme Court de- 
cided he would turn us out anyhow" — and yet 
in the Hampton-Roads Conference (1865), he 



ii6 Lee and His Cause 

admitted that, "The people of the North were 
as responsible for slavery as the people of the 
South." In one single State (New York), in 
one single year, 1850, one single Abolition 
society aided to escape from their lawful 
owners one hundred and fifty-one fugitives. 
On May ist of that year, Chairman Garritt 
Smith had this report of work done read in 
open session in New York City, remarking — 
'Tor that, you know, is our business." By 
such means, from 1810 to 1861, it is estimated 
by Chief Justice Taney of Maryland, that $28,- 
500,000 worth of negroes were enticed to leave 
their lawful owners. It was thus that my own 
''Black Mammy" was lured from the parsonage 
in Covington, Kentucky, whilst I had yet much 
need of her ! 

There was another cause that contributed 
powerfully to produce the discontent which at 
last resulted in disunion — a cause as provoking 
as any that has been named — a cause far older 
than the Harriet Beecher Stowe book, and yet 
as recent as the John Brown raid, and even 
more costly to the South — a cause of more 
widespread influence, if not of so sudden and 
shocking effects, than of both those combined 
— the enactment by Congress of Protective 



Lee and His Cause 117 

Tariff Laws. For years unnumbered, these 
had been the means of financial and commercial 
disparagement and depletion of the South. 
The Federal Constitution conferred upon 
Congress the power ''to lay and collect Taxes, 
Duties, Imposts and Excises to pay the Debts 
and provide for the common Defense and gen- 
eral Welfare of the United States." Under 
this authority, in the year 181 6, duties unjust 
and oppressive to the South, were first made 
legal, and such are being still collected. The 
system had its origin in a benevolent design to 
provide for the debt left upon us by the War 
of 1812, and also to indemnify certain North- 
ern patriots for services rendered and losses 
sustained during and after that successful 
struggle. These Xew England mechanics and 
merchants had invested capital in manufactur- 
ing plants and war materials which the wel- 
come but unexpected peace had rendered of 
little further use and much diminished value. 
The consequent fall in prices of such goods 
threatened these citizens with heavy losses, and 
it was to prevent greater depreciation of values 
that the tariff of 181 6 was proposed and 
enacted. At the outset, the motive was 
sympathetic and patriotic; in the progress of 



ii8 Lee and His Cause 

commerce and legislation, it became selfish and 
sectional ; and in the end, the effort brought on 
a bloody, wicked and fratricidal war. To this 
day, it has operated to enrich immensely the 
Northern States, and as steadily to reduce the 
South. As President Davis says — "It pre- 
sented the not uncommon occurrence of a good 
case making a bad precedent." Well, the mis- 
chievous precedent has been faithfully followed 
and a blind man might now see in the ever- 
increasing vigor of the system its destined im- 
mortality. Why not? The North man loves 
money and has the votes ! 

The whole history of tariff legislation is a 
striking illustration of that memorable saying 
of the great Kansas jurist. Justice Miller — "Of 
all the powers conferred upon Government, 
that of taxation is the most liable to abuse." 
A Southern man can scarcely help adding that, 
of all the abuses of power ever exercised in 
making law in our great Republic, the most 
odious and hurtful to the South has been that 
used to fasten upon us those duties which give 
to individual business and sectional interests 
high protection at the expense of the general 
public and the general good. 



Lee and His Cause 119 

In our early years — from 1789 to 181 6 — 
import duties gave, of course, some incidental 
protection, yet Mr. Clay, and even Mr. Calhoun, 
did not refuse them their support, as measures 
contributing to the country's defense, and made 
necessary by the conditions and consequences 
of the recent war, but not destined like the 
"brook" to run on forever. The system is some- 
times called "the American," and had for its 
father Mr. Clay of Kentucky, but the Confed- 
erate Admiral Raphael Semmes has, with far 
finer descriptive discrimination and much 
better perspective view, styled it "the System 
of Spoliation." The underlying patriotic im- 
pulse of the statesmen of that day was to 
foster, for a time, certain "infant industries," 
and not to inaugurate for centuries a scheme 
of taxation that should rob one section of our 
country to adorn, enrich and strengthen the 
other. The sin and shame of the latter-day 
politicians is, by it, to shut out all foreign 
goods from our home markets and thus enable 
the Northern manufacturer to sell us his own 
wares at his own prices. Nobody can call him 
unnatural, but his policy can hardly be 
regarded as patriotic or tending to bind us 
more closely to him. And the framers of the 



120 Lee and His Cause 

Constitution never contemplated such a per- 
version of its pov^ers. Had it been foreseen, 
the Article allowing it would never have been 
adopted. 

The North had many and deep harbors, 
fleets of boats and ships, capable and hungry 
seamen, immense and cheap water-power, 
much invested capital, thousands of skilled 
workmen and inventive mechanics, she needed 
only the Southern raw materials at the lowest 
prices, and that we should buy her manufac- 
tured goods at the highest figures, and she 
would become rich and strong — no matter 
what the South should say or do. The result 
has not disappointed her. But the long lane 
may have its ''turn !" "The mills of the gods 
grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine." 

The South, although always agricultural, 
was always ready to favor tariffs for revenue, 
and it was only when duties were so laid as to 
pay bounties, subsidies, and promote private 
gain and sectional glory, that she resisted, and 
resisted in vain. The majority ruled. One 
such bill was under consideration in 1828, 
called "the Bill of Abominations," when Mr. 
Drayton, of South Carolina, moved that the 
title be amended to read — "An Act to increase 



Lee and His Cause 121 

the duties upon certain imports for the purpose 
of increasing the profits of certain manufactur- 
ers;" his object being to bring, in this way, the 
vaHdity of the law to the test of the Supreme 
Court of the United States. His motion was 
defeated, of course. The tariff lords wanted 
no judicial decision upon their scheme for 
pecuniary gain and sectional aggrandizement. 
The bill was so wisely worded as to pass for a 
revenue measure, and thus to escape possible 
legal examination, while it was in reality a 
scheme for protection. Is it to be wondered at 
that a sovereign State should bethink herself of 
''nullification" as a remedy, when no other 
was left her? Isn't self-preservation a right 
of Sovereignty as well as a law of Nature ? 

It has been often asserted by Northern poli- 
ticians that the South favored these tariff rates 
until 1828, but the records of Congress show 
the charge to be untrue. The memorials for 
them came from the North ; the speeches made 
against them were all from the South. The 
votes for them were almost all from the North. 
In 1 81 8, eight Northern States supported it. 
The six Southern States were strongly against 
it. In 1824, only Massachusetts and New 
Hampshire voted against it. While the two 



122 Lee and His Cause 

Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and 
Louisiana were unanimously opposed to it. 
So, too, "in 1842, the South was largely 
against the protective act of that year." Had 
the case been otherwise, the South would not 
have cut out of the Confederate Constitution 
the "General Welfare" clause, which had been 
for fifty years the stronghold of the protec- 
tionists; nor would she have prohibited all 
"Bounties from her Treasury, and all Duties 
on Importations from foreign nations, to pro- 
mote or foster any branch of industry." Such 
facts refute ten thousands of misrepresenta- 
tions. Indeed, her whole history in the Union, 
and her experience under the system disprove 
the falsehood. 

Senator Benton, of Missouri, although no 
friend of slavery, gave in the United States 
Senate, in 1828, this double reason for the per- 
sistent opposition of the South to such ruinous 
legislation — "I feel for the sad changes that 
have taken place in the South during the last 
fifty years. Before the Revolution, it was the 
seat of wealth as well as of hospitality. Money, 
and all it commanded, abounded there. But 
how now? All this is reversed. Wealth has 
fled from the South and settled in the regions 



Lee and His Cause 123 

North of the Potomac. And this in the face of 
the fact that the South, in four staples alone, 
has exported produce since the revolution, to 
the value of eight hundred millions of dollars ; 
and the North has exported comparatively 
nothing. Such an export would indicate un- 
paralleled wealth, but what is the fact? In 
the place of wealth, a universal pressure for 
money was felt — not enough for current 
expenses — the price of all property down — the 
country drooping and languishing — towns and 
cities decaying — and the frugal habits of the 
people pushed to the verge of universal self- 
denial for the preservation of their family 
estates. Such a result is a strange and won- 
derful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to 
inquire into the cause. Under Federal legisla- 
tion the exports of the South have been the 
basis of the Federal revenue Vir- 
ginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be 
said to defray three- fourths of the annual ex- 
penses of supporting the Federal Government; 
and of this great sum, annually furnished by 
them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned 
to them in the shape of Government expendi- 
tures. That expenditure flows in an opposite 
direction. It flows northwardly in one uniform, 



124 Lee and His Cause 

uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is 
the reason why wealth disappears from the 
South, and rises up in the North. Federal 
legislation does all this. It does it by the simple 
process of taking eternally from the South and 
returning nothing to it. If it returned to the 
South the whole, or even a g-ood part of what it 
exacted, the four States south of the Potomac 
might stand the action of the system, but the 
South must be exhausted of its money and 
propert}^ by a course of legislation which is for- 
ever taking away and never returning any- 
thing. Every new tariff increases the force of 
this action. No tariff has ever yet included 
Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, 
except to increase the burdens imposed upon 
them." This double back-action principle for 
keeping poor the South is, like the poor them- 
selves, always with us, and there seems no help 
for us. 

Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, referring to the 
cjuestion raised by Senator Benton, says : 
*'How did slavery produce this wonderful 
transformation? How did slavery work all 
this ruin? Slavery, it is well known, existed 
before the Revolution as well as afterward; 
and accompanied the South in the palmiest 



Lee and His Cause 125 

days of her prosperity, as well as in the darkest 
and most dismal hour of her adversity. Hence, 
it was not, and could not have been, the one 
cause of so great and so sudden a change. And 
besides, instead of having ceased to produce, 
the fair and fruitful South continued to pour 
forth, in greater abundance than ever, the 
broad streams of national prosperity and 
wealth. Hence she was impoverished, not be- 
cause the fountains of her former supply had 
been dried up, or even diminished in volume, 
but because the great streams flowing from 
them did not return into her own bosom. Into 
what region of the earth then, did these 
streams empty themselves?" Let every land- 
scape, harbor, sea coast, mountain side, lake 
front, and city park, stately corner, and public 
high way, decorated and protected by Federal 
treasury funds answer it. And if any tourist 
wonders at the startling contrast seen through- 
out the Sunny South, let him be told in tones 
of hypocritical pity, "Ah ! You behold here the 
blight of slavery. The thrift that you saw in 
the North was due to the invigorating, glori- 
ous air of freedom! What a sad thing it is 
that the South was so long cursed with 



126 Lee and His Cause 

slavery!" Comrades, don't that make you 
weary and feel the need of prayer ? 

But it wasn't freedom alone, that adorned, 
strengthened, enriched, peopled and glorified 
the North. The almighty dollar played its 
part. Yankee Doodle wanted many things — 
wider roads, higher bridges, bigger tunnels, 
deeper harbors, longer canals, additional light- 
houses, more buoys, locks, docks, dams, forts, 
arsenals, smoother highways, safer travel, 
cheaper transportation, easier post-routes, 
handsomer cities, parks, historical gates, 
groups, arches, monuments, statues, and the 
like ; and as votes make the laws, and the laws 
make money, and money makes every improve- 
ment, why should she not have all the improve- 
ments that heart can wish, and money buy? 
Have them, she will! The South — well — she 
may have as Dr. Bledsoe says — "The crumbs 
that fall from the rich man's table !" 

The South took up arms not to extend slave 
territory, not alone to keep the blacks in bond- 
age, not for the balance of power, not for com- 
mercial supremacy, not to destroy the Union, 
but to maintain her political rights, especially 
the original^ inherent, sovereign, blood-bought 
right of local self-government — to escape the 



Lee and His Cause 127 

centralization of power in the Federal Govern- 
ment which was now determined to reduce the 
Southern States to a condition of political help- 
lessness. The North tried to load down the 
South with the odium of slavery as the cause 
of secession and war, but it was only the cir- 
cumstance that brought on the explosion, the 
fuse that fired the magazine ; the dynamite was 
deep hidden in the political doctrines of the 
sections which were diametrically opposed and 
antagonistic. General Lee must have known 
for what he fought, and he writes of the war 
as ^'otir struggle for State rights and Constitu- 
tional government/' Would Lee be ignorant 
of it or lie about it? After the overthrow of 
General McClellan in the "Seven Days Bat- 
tles," in front of Richmond, the Confederate 
Chief in an address of congratulation to his 
victorious army, refers to their humane treat- 
ment of their (ten thousand) prisoners, as 
"the fit crowning glory to your valor," and 
then in a single line, speaking for himself and 
all Southern soldiers, says, ''you are fighting 
for all that is dearest to man/' Did he mean 
the negroes that the Yankees had unloaded on 
us ? Who can think it ? 



128 Lee and His Cause 

General Order No. i6. To the Army of 
Northern Virginia, vvas issued July nth, 1863, 
just a week after the fight at Gettysburg. I 
suppose by that time General Lee had learned 
for what he was fighting. It runs — ''Let every 
soldier remember that on his courage and fidel- 
ity depends all that makes life worth having, 
the freedom of his country, the honor of his 
people, and the security of his home. Sol- 
diers, your old enemy is before you. Win 
from him honor worthy of your cause, worthy 
of your comrades dead on so many illustrious 
fields." Was Lee ignorant of the objects of 
the war, or was he unable to state them ? 

The responsibility of the North for the war 
is avouched by Abraham Lincoln himself. *Tt 
is you, Medill, (of the Chicago Tribiuic), who 
is largely responsible for making blood flow as 
it has. You called for war until you had it. I 
have given it to you. What you have asked 
for you have had. Now you come begging to 
be let ofT from the call for more men, which I 
have made to carry on the war that you de- 
manded. You ought to be ashamed of your- 
self!" So says Miss Tarbell in "Lincoln's 
Life." Query, If Medill is responsible, how 
can Davis and Toombs be ? 



Lee and His Cause 129 

The immediate cause of the war, the act that 
brought on the trouble was an attempt by the 
Federal administration to reinforce and pro- 
vision Fort Sumter. This fort, commanding 
the harbor, was within the domain of South 
Carolina. The State had withdrawn from the 
Union by the formal and unanimous actiion of 
her people in Convention assembled. The fort 
was held by soldiers of the United States. 
These were expecting reinforcements. A fleet 
with arms and provisions was waiting in the 
nearby waters. Eleven ships carrying twenty- 
six guns and two thousand four hundred men 
from the North had gone to strengthen the 
garrison "peaceably if permitted, forcibly if 
they must." That "overt act" began the war! 
The firing of Beauregard was merely the 
natural consequence. The Southron fired first, 
the Northman had drazvn first. Our shot was 
in self defense, to prevent being taken in front 
and rear. The only question arising is, was 
Beauregard under obligation to wait for his 
foe to strike him down — ^was not the armed 
attitude and hostile intention of his enemy 
ample provocation to justify "the shot that was 
heard around the world?" The people of 



130 Lee and His Cause 

Dixie think it was. But let us look more 
closely into the question. 

On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis and 
Alexander H. Stevens were inaugurated Presi- 
dent and Vice-President. Mr. Davis at once 
named his cabinet and complied with the con- 
vention's instructions, "to send duly accredited 
commissioners to Washington to establish 
friendly relations and to adjust all matters of 
public property, public debt, etc., so as to 
avoid war, and upon principles of right, justice, 
equity and good faith" — so read their creden- 
tials. Previously, and at once upon her seces- 
sion. South Carolina had sent commissioners 
for the same purpose. Their special mission 
had been to treat for Forts Moultrie and Sum- 
ter in Charleston Harbor, and which, ceded by 
South Carolina to the Government, in trust, 
and for the defense of Charleston, by law, re- 
verted to the State upon her secession. Sum- 
ter was then unoccupied and Major Robert 
Anderson with sixty-three men, lay in Fort 
Moultrie. Before these commissioners could 
see President Buchanan, Major Anderson, act- 
ing under orders, spiked his guns in Moultrie, 
and by night moved his garrison to Sumter, 
which with stronger walls and surrounded by 



Lee and His Cause 131 

water was more easily held. (This was itself 
a warlike act, in a time of peace, and done 
by "night," too.) After one fruitless inter- 
view with the President, who declined to 
receive them or their communications, the 
commissioners returned home, having effected 
nothing. The appointment and instructions of 
these two commissions clearly indicates the 
peaceable intentions of the South. Further 
proof is found also in the early and earnest 
efforts of Virginia to promote "pacific settle- 
ment" by inviting all the States to a Peace 
Congress to meet in Washington, February 4, 
1 86 1. Twenty-one States responded, but it all 
ended, to quote Senator Chandler, of Michi- 
gan — "In thin smoke." That gentleman was 
strongly opposed to any compromise, had 
urged his State "to send stiff-backed men or 
none," and argued that "without a little blood- 
letting, this Union will not be worth a rush." 

That the South did not desire or expect war 
is further apparent from her defenseless condi- 
tion. She had no army and no weapons, nor 
was there a powder mill, or rifle factory in all 
the seceding States, so that afterwards, some 
regiments were armed with pikes only, and 
others with flint-locks and shot guns! Many 



132 Lee and His Cause 

thought that sober and wiser counsels would 
prevail in the North; so that the States might 
soon return to the Union; others felt that the 
separation was permanent, but would be peace- 
able; only rabid extremists talked of war. In 
the North as wiell, there was no thought of bat- 
tle or bloodshed. From the platform, through 
the press, in great centers, in Congress, and 
even by the President, the opinion had been 
widely and strongly expressed that a war of 
coercion was unconstitutional, unjust and im- 
possible. 

The question of coercion had long ago been 
incidentally passed upon and legally settled by 
the hig^hest court known to our political system. 
In the contest over rendition between Ohio 
and Kentucky, being tried by the United States 
Supreme Court, speaking of the powers held 
respectively by State and Federal Governments, 
Mr. Chief Justice Taney, in giving the Court's 
decision said : ''While admitting that the Con- 
stitution is mandatory on the Governors, there 
is not a line in it which gives power to the Gen- 
eral Government to compel a State to do any- 
thing." This opinion was as widely accepted 
as it was judicially well founded. 



Lee and His Cause 133 

The fact is that, so far from possessing or 
even claiming to possess, "The power to compel 
a State" to remain in the Union, our General 
Government had held all along, and had for 
many years actually taught the doctrine of the 
lawfulness of secession. This fact has been 
clearly esftablished by many competent wit- 
nesses. Large credit for the knowledge of it is 
due to Col. Robert Bingham, superintendent of 
Bingham School, Asheville, North Carolina. 
By recent painstaking, and persevering corre- 
spondence, he has proven quite fully that, since 
1825 and probably to 1840, ''Razde's Viezv of 
the Constitution of the United States" was a 
text-book in the Military Academy at West 
Point, where the future commanders of the 
armies of the Republic are thoroughly in- 
structed in both the science and art of 
warfare. This evidence I w'ill give in part 
here, for the sake of the light it throws 
upon the question of the right of peace- 
ful secession, as well as on the matter of the 
guilt or innocency of the crimes of treason 
and rebellion in the conduct of the greatest 
soldiers in the armies of the Southern Con- 
federacy. Having Rawile's work in my own 



134 Lee and His Cause 

library, I can certify to the correctness of the 
quotations given below. But first of the author, 
book, students, etc. Hear these witnesses. 

(From the Superintendent of the United States 

Military Academy.) 
Headquarters United States Military 

ACADEMY_, 

West Point, N. Y., Nov. i8, 1904. 

* * * In the forthcoming Memorial 
Volume of the Military Academy now being 
printed will appear the following note regard- 
ing the book : 

342, 731 R., 20 Rawle (William) : A 
view of the Constitution of the United States 
of America. Philadelphia, 1825, Iv., O. 

The text-book, of the law department from 
— to — . The copy of this book owned by 
Library, United States Military Academy 
makes it very probable that it was used as a 
text book. 
(Signed) A. L. Mills, Brig.-Gen., 

U. S. A., Superintendent. 



Lee and His Cause 135 

(From the Librarian of the United States 
MiHtary Academy.) 
Library^ United States Military 
Academy, 
West Point, N. Y., Nov. 23, 1904. 

* * * The copy of Rawle (WilHam) : 
"A View of the Constitution of the United 
States of America;" Philadelphia, 1825; Iv., 
O., owned by the Library, U. S. M. A., con- 
tains Ms. notes which make it very probable 
that this book was used as a text-book at the 
Military Academy, inasmuch as there is a list 
of sections and lessons marked. The book 
contains no information as to just the period 
during which it was used as a text-book, nor 
have we been able to find this out up to the 
present time. 

(Signed) Edward S. Holden, 

Librarian. 

(From the Librarian of Congress). 
Library of Congress, 

Washington, Dec. 3, 1904. 

* * * I find on examination of the An- 
nual Catalogues of the West Point Military 



136 Lee and His Cause 

Academy that no text-books appear to be 
named until A. D., 1842. 

(Signed) A. R. Spofford. 

(From a Great-grandson of Wm. Rawle). 
211 S. Sixth Street, 
Philadelphia, Dec. 13, 1904. 

* * * The book entitled, "A View of 
the Constitution of the United States of Amer- 
ica" was written by my great grandfather. 
* * * The book was, I think, the first 
author, after having studied law in New York 
under the Royal Attorney General and later in 
the Middle Temple in London, was admitted 
to the Philadelphia bar, September 15, 1783. 
He was therefore of an age to appreciate the 
doings of the Constitutional Convention of 
1787, which sat in this City where he resided. 
Doubtless he attended its sittings, although I 
do not find among his papers any statement 
to that effect. The work, I have always 
understood, was for many years used as a text- 
book at the United States Military Academy 
at West Point. 

(Signed) Wm. Brooke Rawle. 



Lee and His Cause 137 

(From John Rawle, Grandson of Wm. Rawle). 
Natchez, Miss., Jan. 2y, 1905. 

* * * In re, William Rawle, my grand- 
father, I am aware that his view on the "Con- 
stitution of the United States" was used as a 
text-book at West Point, but I do not recollect 
in what years it was. Gen. R. E. Lee, et al., 
said that they were taught by that book while 
at West Point. ^ ^ ^ General Lee told 
Bishop Wilmer, of Louisiana, that if it had not 
been for the instruction he got from Rawle's 
text-book at West Point he would not have 
left the Old Army and joined the South at the 
breaking out of the late war between the States. 

(Signed) John Rawle. 

(From Joseph Wilmer, a Son of Bishop 
Wilmer). 
Rapidan, Va., Feb. 10, 1905. 

* * * I have a distinct recollection of 
my father's statement that General Lee told 
him that "Rawle" was a text-book during his 
cadetship at West Point. * * * 



138 Lee and His Cause 

(From Mrs. M. J. Leeds, Granddaughter of 
William Rawle). 
New Orleans^ La.^ Jan. 19, 1905. 

* * * I am positive that th'i work of my 
grandfather, William Rawle, was used as a 
text-book at West Point. I have heard this 
from my own father. Judge Edward Rawle, 
who died in 1880, a son of the author of the 
book. 

(Signed) Mrs. M. J. Leeds. 

(From Judge G. L. Christian). 

Christian & Christian Law Offices, 

Chamber of Commerce Building,, 

Richmond, Va., Dec., 1904. 

* * * I have frequently heard Generals 
D. H. Maury and Fitzhugh Lee state the fact 
that "Rawle on the Constitution" was one of 
the text-books used at West Point when they 
were students there. I have also heard the 
same statement iterated and reiterated time 
and time again without any suggestion that 
there was any question about it. I saw General 



Lee and His Cause 139 

Lee last night, and he again told me that there 
was no doubt about this being the fact. 

(Signed) Geo. L. Christian. 

(From General Fitzhugh Lee) 

Norfolk, Va., Dec. 5, 1904. 

* -'■ * My recollection is that Rawle's 
View of the Constitution was the legal text- 
book at West Point when Generals Lee, Joseph 
E. Johnson and Stonewall Jackson were cadets 
there, and later on was a text-book when I was 
a cadet there. 

(Signed) Fitzhugh Lee. 

(From General Dabney H. Maury). 
In Vol. 6, p. 249, So. Historical Papers : 

* * * It (Rawle) remained as a text- 
book at West Point till ; and Mr. Davis 

and Sidney Johnston and General Joe John- 
ston and General Lee and all the rest of us who 
retired with Virginia from the Federal Union, 
were not only obeying the plain instincts of 
our nature and dictates of duty, but we were 
obeying the very inculcations we had received 
in the National Schools. It is not probable 



140 Lee and His Cause 

that any of us ever read the Constitution or any 
exposition of it except this work of Rawle, 
which we studied in our Graduating year at 
West Point. I know I did not. * * >k 
(Signed) Dabney H. Maury. 

(From Charles Francis Adams.) 
Adams Building, 23 Court Street, 

Boston, Dec. 8, 1904. 

* * * Herewith, under another cover, I 
send a copy of a pubHcation of mine (The 
Constitutional Ethics of Secession), which 
bears very directly upon the point made in your 
letter. On page 16, in Note i, may be found 
all I know on the subject of Rawle's View of 
the Constitution, and the use of its as a text- 
book at West Point. 

You will note I there state as a fact that his 
View was the text-book in use at West Point 
prior to 1840. * * * j remember that, at 
that time (two years ago) I looked the matter 
up with the utmost care, corresponding with 
the librarian and authorities at West Point, and 
also with at least one legal authority in New 



Lee and His Cause 141 

York. The result and my conclusion, are set 
forth in the note. 

(Signed) Chas. F. Adams. 

From 'The Constitutional Ethics of Seces- 
sion," by Chas. Francis Adams. Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1903, pages 16-17: 

"(i) Much has been written and said, and 
still more declaimed, as to the peculiar and ex- 
ceptional allegiance due, in case of attempted 
secession, to the National Government on the 
part of the graduates of the Military Academy 
at West Point. It is, however, a noticeable 
fact that anterior to 1840 the doctrine of the 
rig-ht of secession seems to have been incul- 
cated at West Point as an admitted principle 
of Constitutional Law. Story's Commentaries 
was first published in 1833. Prior to its ap- 
pearance the standard text-book on the subject 
was Rawle's View of the Constitution. This 
was published in Philadelphia in 1825. Wil- 
liam Rawle, its author, was an eminent Phila- 
delphia lawyer. A man of twenty-nine at the 
time the Constitution was adopted, and already 
in active professional life; in 1792 he was 
offered a judicial position by Washington. 



142 Lee and His Cause 

Subsequently he was for many years Chan- 
cellor of the Law Association of Philadelphia, 
and principal author of the revised code of 
Pennsylvania. He stood in the foremost rank 
of the legal luminaries of the first third of the 
century. His instincts, sympathies and con- 
nections were all national. Prior to 1840, his 
'View' was the text-book in use at West 
Point." 

From "The Republic of Republics." Little, 
Brown & Co., Boston, 4th Edition, 1878, 
Preface, p. V : 

"Another event of great historical interest 
in which Judge Clifford participated, was a 
solemn consultation of a small number of the 
ablest lawyers of the North in Washington a 
few months after the war upon the momen- 
tous question as to whether the Federal Gov- 
ernment should commence a criminal prosecu- 
tion against Jefferson Davis for his participa- 
tion and leadership in the war of secession. 
In this council, which was surrounded at the 
time with the utmost secrecy, were Attorney- 
General Speed, Judge Clifford, Wm. Evarts, 
and perhaps half a dozen others, who had been 
selected from the whole Northern profession 



Lee and His Cause 143 

for their legal ability and acumen, and the re- 
sult of their deliberation was the sudden 
abandonment (of the idea of a prosecution) 
in view of the insurmountable difficulties in 
the way of getting a final conviction." 

Republic of Republics, page 44 : 

"The above work (Rawle's View) was a 
text-book at West Point when Lee and Davis 
were cadets there." 

Footnote i, p. 33 : 

"They (Davis and Lee) were at West Point 
during the administration of John Quincy 
Adams, who, as late as 1839, essayed to teach 
the whole American people that, 'the people 
of each State have a right to secede from the 
confederated Union.' These are his very 
words." 

("The Republics of Republics" is under- 
stood to have given some of the lines of de- 
fense by Jefferson Davis' counsel if the case 
had been brought to trial, and to have had the 
approval of Mr. Davis himself. The book is 
very highly spoken of by Charles O'Connor, 
one of Mr. Davis' counsel, and one of the most 
distinguished lawyers in the United States in 
his day, who wrote to the author in 1865 (see 



144 Lee and His Cause 

page IV), * * >i^ "wit'h so admirably pre- 
pared and so overwhelmingly conclusive a brief 
(as his book) my task (of defending Mr. 
Davis) would be easy indeed." 

If there were ''insurmountable difficulties in 
the way of getting a final conviction," it stands 
to reason that, the defense "would be easy, in- 
deed." 

The following letter explains itself: 
''41 17 Pine Street, 
Philadelphia, March 25, 1884. 

''Dear Col. Bingham: While the question 
of Jeff. Davis's trial for high treason was 
pending, Mr. Wm. B. Reed, counsel for the 
defense, was a member of my brother's con- 
gregation at Orange Valley, N. J. He told 
my brother, after it had been decided that the 
trial was not to take place, that if the case had 
come to trial the defense would have offered 
in evidence the text-book on constitutional law 
(Rawle's View of the Constitution) from 
which Davis had been instructed at West 
Point by the authority of the United States 
Government, and in which the right of seces- 
sion is maintained as one of the constitutional 
rights of a State. You are quite at liberty to 



Lee and His Cause 145 

refer to me for this statement, which is given 
according to the best of my recollection. 

L. W. Bacon. 

(Rev. Dr. Bacon's present address is Asso- 
net, Mass.) 

This cloud of witnesses, living and dead, men 
and women, Northern and Southern, military 
and literary, establishes satisfactorily at least 
nine points; namely: ist — That Wm. Rawle 
did write and publish in 1825, in Philadelphia, 
"A View of the Constitution." 2d — That he 
was a very able man, thoroughly competent, 
and favorably situated to execute his task. 
3rd — That his book does teach the right of se- 
cession. 4th — ^That it was an accepted authority 
in that day. 5 th — That it was a text-book in 
the course at West Point, where it remains 
still, and yet showing the class-lesson marks. 
6th — That General Lee was then, and for 
years afterwards there as cadet and student. 
7th — That in 1861, he defended the cause of 
Virginia and the South rather than fight for 
"the Union," and this because of the instruc- 
tion given him at West Point. 8th — That the 
Federal Government knowing these facts, and 
that they would be brought out by counsel in 
court if President Davis should be put upon 



146 Lee and His Cause 

trial for treason, decided not to try him, thus 
denying him the opportunity to vindicate him- 
self and his co-patriots of the Southland. 9th 
— That Lee himself said that he would not 
have left the old Army and joined the South, 
but for the instruction that he had received 
from "Rawle's View of the Constitution." 

In the face of these facts how monstrous 
would have been the attempt to punish for 
treason Mr. Davis or General Lee, who had 
only put into practice the doctrine taught 
them at West Point! And how cruel to 
accuse President Davis of it, imprison and 
indict him for it, and then deny him a hear- 
ing in which he might prove himself innocent ! 
How would such a record as this have looked on 
the page of History? Cadet Jefferson Davis 
taught at West Point in 1825 the lawfulness 
of secession. The said Davis practices in 1861 
the said doctrine with the people of Missis- 
sippi. The United States Government charges 
with treason the said Davis, and tries him at 
Richmond, Virginia, in 1866 for doing what 
it had taught him was lawful when he was at 
West Point. And the said Davis was acquit- 
ted for the sole reason that the jury could 
''find no fault in hint''? 



Lee and His Cause 147 

The extracts from ''Rawle's View" need no 
preface or explanation. He says: "If a fac- 
tion should attempt to subvert the government 
of a State for the purpose of destroying its 
republican form, the national power of the 
Union could be called forth to subdue it. Yet 
it is not to be understood that its interposition 
would be justifiable if a State should deter- 
mine to retire from the Union." (p. 289). 
"It depends on the State itself whether it will 
continue a member of the Union. To deny 
this right would be inconsistent with the prin- 
ciple on which all our political systems are 
founded, which is, that the people have in all 
cases the right to determine how they shall be 
governed." (p. 289).- "The States may then 
wholly withdraw from the Union." (p. 290). 
"We have associated as republics. Possess- 
ing the power to form, monarchies, republics 
were preferred and instituted." 

"If a majority of the people of a State delib- 
erately and peaceably resolve to relinquish the 
republican form of government, they cease to 
be members of the Union." (p. 292). "The 
secession of a State from the Union depends 
on the will of the people of such State." (p. 
295)- "-'^^ ^^y nianner by which secession is 



148 Lee and His Cause 

to take place, nothing is more certain than that 
the act should be deliberate, clear and unequiv- 
ocal." (p. 296). "The people of a State may 
have reason to complain in respect to the acts 
of the general government; they may, in such 
cases, invest some of their own officers with 
the power of negotiation, and may declare an 
absolute secession in case of failure. The se- 
cession in such cases must be distinctly and 
peremptorily declared to take place, and in 
such case, as the case of unconditional seces- 
sion, the previous ligament with the Union 
would be legitimately and fairly destroyed." 
(p. 296). "It was foreseen that there would 
be a natural tendency to increase the number 
of the States. It was also known that a State 
might withdraw itself." (p. 297). "Seces- 
sions may reduce the number of the States to 
the smallest integer admitting combination." 
"To withdraw from the Union is a solemn, 
serious act." "Whenever it may appear expe- 
dient to the people of a State to withdraw 
from the Union, it must be manifested in a di- 
rect and unequivocal manner." (p. 298). 
And also "this right (of secession) must 
be considered an ingredient in the original 
composition of the general government, and 



Lee and His Cause 149 

the doctrine heretofore presented in regard to 
the indefeasable nature of personal allegiance 
is so far qualified in respect to allegiance to the 
United States. It was observed that the reci- 
procal relations of protection and allegiance 
might cease in certain events, and it was 
further observed that allegiance would neces- 
sarily cease in case of the dissolution of the 
society (the Union in that case) to which it 
was due." (p. 289-290). 

But I was speaking of the collision at Sum- 
ter. This changed things and precipitated the 
struggle. For this, the South has been uni- 
versally blamed, but the facts are these : — The 
fort belonged to the Federal Government, was 
built and held in trust for the defense of 
Charleston; the site belonged to South Caro- 
lina and had been ceded in trust to the Govern- 
ment on condition that it should be used for 
that purpose. When the secession of the State 
put that defense out of the question, commis- 
sioners were sent, as we have seen, to treat for 
the transfer of the fort. They were repulsed. 
As soon as the Confederacy was established, 
another commission was sent to adjust these 
property rights and treat for the transfer of 
Sumter, the only fort yet held by the United 



150 Lee and His Cause 

States Government. Mr. Lincoln had been 
inaugurated meanwhile and the commission- 
ers had to deal with his Secretary of State, 
Mr. W. H. Seward. Negotiations were con- 
ducted through Justices Nelson and Campbell 
of the Supreme Court of the United States, be- 
cause Mr. Seward declined to see the commis- 
sioners himself. Nelson urged Seward to 
refrain from any policy of coercion, on the 
ground that such "is serious violation of the 
Constitution." On March 15, Mr. Seward 
authorized Judge Campbell in writing to tell 
Mr. Davis that "Before a letter could reach 
him, he would learn by telegraph that the order 
for evacuation of Sumter had been made." This 
word was sent. March 20th, Campbell again 
saw Seward, who told him that ''The delay in 
the evacuation of the fort zvas accidental,'' and 
repeated his assurance that the garrison would 
be withdrawn. Campbell says, "I repeated 
this assurance ir; writing to the commissioners, 
and informed Mr. Seward in v^^riting, what I 
had said to them." March 19th, the day 
before this renewed assurance was given, a 
special envoy had left Washington for 
Charleston to obtain information and devise 
means by which Sumter might be — not evacii- 



Lee and His Cause 151 

ated, hut reinforced! And Mr. George Lunt 
of Massachusetts says — *'It was intended to 
draw the fire of the Confederates" — a silent ag- 
gression to produce an active aggression. 

Pledging "pacific purposes," Captain G. V. 
Fox, sent from Washington by Lincoln, was 
allowed by Governor Pickens to visit the fort, 
where on the parapet, at night, of March 21st, 
he had a private interview with Major Ander- 
son, matured his plan, submitted, and had it 
approved by President Lincoln, and was sent 
to New York to arrange for its execution. 
Anderson strongly opposed the attempt to rein- 
force him: he "at once earnestly condemned 
it" — so says Major General S. W. Crawford, 
U. S. Army — said it was too late ; agreed with 
his superior, General Scott, that an entrance 
by sea was impossible, and said that the com- 
ing of reinforcements would bring on a colli- 
sion and inaugurate a civil war, and to this he 
manifested the most earnest opposition." The 
belief was now general on both sides that the 
garrison would be withdrawn, and Major An- 
derson had given his official instructions as to 
the disposal of the property. ( See the "Genesis 
of Civil War" by Crawford.) 



152 Lee and His Cause 

On March 25th, Col. Ward H. Lamon, 
another envoy, sent by Lincoln , "informed 
me," says Governor Pickens, that he had come 
as confidential agent of the President ^Ho 
arrange for the removal of the garrison.'' 
After a visit to the fort, and his return to 
Washington, he wrote the Governor that he 
*'hoped to return in a few days to withdraw 
the command." This was on March 30th, 
fifteen days after Mr. Seward's original assur- 
ance of evacuation, and ten days after his ex- 
planation that the delay in doing it was "acci- 
dental." On April ist, Campbell again saw 
Seward, who gave him the statement in writ- 
ing for the Commissioners — "The Govern- 
ment will not undertake to supply Sumter 
without notice to Governor Pickens." As this 
assurance was very different from the others, 
Campbell asked him, "Whether I was to un- 
derstand that there had been a change in his 
former communications?" Seward answered, 
''None.'' On April 7th, in view of continued 
rumors of hostile preparations of the Govern- 
ment, Campbell again wrote Seward, asking 
whether "the assurances given were well or ill 
founded?" Seward wrote back — ''Faith as 
to Sumter fully kept. Wait and see." Yet the 



Lee and His Cause 153 

day before this, Mr. Lincoln had sent one of 
Seward's officials, a Mr. Chew of the State 
Department, to notify Governor Pickens that 
''An attempt will be made to supply Sum- 
ter with provisions only, but no attempt will 
be made to throw in men, arms or ammu- 
nition." And yet, in spite of this promise, and 
against the protest of several cabinet officers, 
of the Commander-in-Chief of the army, and 
of Major Anderson himself, a squadron of 
eleven vessels with twenty-six guns and 2,400 
men had been ordered by Lincoln to be ready to 
sail on April the sixth and appeared off the 
mouth of Charleston Harbor on April nth, but 
was prevented from entering by a storm. The 
news of the conning fleet having reached the 
Confederate Government, it sought to obtain 
possession of Sumter before the reinforce- 
ments reached it, and April nth was spent 
in dispatches between Major Anderson and 
General Beauregard, in which the latter 
asked the evacuation of the fort, and offered 
every facility for the removal of men, and 
arms and property. The former regretted 
that "sense of honor, and of obligation to my 
Government, prevents compliance," and sent 



154 Lee and His Cause 

thanks for what he calls "the fair, manly, 
courteous terms proposed and for the high 
compliment to me." April 12th, expecting 
the fleet any moment to enter the Harbor, 
Beauregard sent word to Anderson that he 
would open fire. Thus the South fired the first 
gun. The student of the above facts will 
judge for himself, who began the war, and 
whether or not, it was treason and rebellion or 
necessary self-defense. Hallam, the great 
English Historian, says — ''The aggressor in 
war, that is, he who begins it, is not the first 
who uses force, but the first who renders force 
necessary." 

To aid my hearer's judgment, and to vindi- 
cate my countrymen now gone to the bar of 
God, I here recite one additional fact as evi- 
dence, from the lips of a witness never 
impeached, and upon authority that will not 
be questioned. In his "Life of Lee," Dr. H. 
A. White of the Washington and Lee Uni- 
versity, notes the fact that, "an ordinance of 
secession submitted to the Virginia Conven- 
tion, March 17th, was rejected by a vote of 
ninety to forty-five." Just two to one against 
it. The new President, the successor in the 
seat of Washington, requested at once an in- 



Lee and His Cause 155 

terview with some representative of the Con- 
vention. On April 4th, Mr. J. B. Baldwin, 
President of the Convention, and who had voted 
against the secession of Virginia, on March 
I /th, was sent to Washington and had a confer- 
ence with Lincoln. He was greeted by the 
President with the assertion that he had come 
too late. So he has stated under oath. Lin- 
coln would not listen to his pleadings that he 
should yield the Southern forts, and so pre- 
serve peace. Now remember this — On April 
4th, Lincoln declares — ''It is too late/' But 
on April 7th, his Secretary of State, Seward 
being urged in writing by Judge Campbell to 
say whether the assurances so often given the 
Commissioners were well or ill founded (as to 
the removal of the garrison from Sumter), 
replied in writing — 'Taith as to Sumter fully 
kept. Wait and see." The question is who 
told the truth? Light is thrown on it by other 
undeniable statements and facts of record. The 
next day, an official note, unsigned and un- 
dated, was handed Governor Pickens in Char- 
leston, South Carolina, by Mr. Chew, of the 
State Department at Washington, who said 
that it was from Lincoln, and had been given to 



156 Lee and His Cause 

him by the President of the United States, on 
April 6th, or only a day before the assurance of 
Seward that, as to Sumter, "faith would be 
fully kept." The paper said — "I am directed 
by the President of the United States to 
notify you to expect an attempt will be made 
to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only: 
and that, if such an attempt be not resisted, 
no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition 
will be made without further notice, or in case 
of an attack upon the fort." This shows 
clearly that Lincoln told the truth to Mr. Bald- 
win on April 4th in saying that "It is too late." 
He had already ordered the invasion of Charles- 
ton harbor by armed men and ships. 

Here is disclosed a scheme to gain time by 
misleading the Confederates until an armed 
fleet fully provisioned could be sent into the 
Charleston Harbor to supply and reinforce the 
little garrison. The President played his part, 
and the Secretary played his, and one seems 
about as honest and honorable as the other. 
But, my hearer, "wait and see!" On the 12th 
of April, a second Committee was sent from 
Richmond to see the President, and ascertain 
definitely his policy. On the 14th day of April, 
Mr. Lincoln's reply in writing to the Com- 



Lee and His Cause 157 

mittee was "distinctly pacific and he expressly 
disclaimed all purpose of war." The next 
day, the Committee left for Richmond, and the 
same train that bore them took also Lincoln's 
requisition upon the Governors of the States 
for an army of 75,000 men to subjugate the 
South ! Now, here is Lincoln giving per- 
sonal assurance of "pacific" intentions — dis- 
claiming expressly all purpose of war, on April 
14th — when on April 6th, he had sent Gov- 
ernor Pickens word that an attempt to pro- 
vision Sumter would be made, and on April 
1 2th, the hostile Federal fleet of eleven vessels, 
twenty-six guns, and 2,400 men were just out- 
side the harbor and coming in ! Did it require 
all those men and cannon to land the bread- 
stuffs for sixty-three soldiers, or were they 
sent to garrison and hold the fort against the 
city and State for whose defense it had been 
built and equipped ? 



IV. 



A PEOPLE HAS BUT ONE DANGEROUS ENEMY, AND THAT IS 

Government. — Saint Just, France, A. D., 1793. 

) 
IT WAS A GREAT WAR. 

Careful and competent judges (one a Cabi- 
net member, Secretary Shaw, of the United 
States Treasury) tell us that there were, during 
the four years, three thousand, one hundred 
and twenty, conflicts of arms! "The total 
cost of the Civil War has been moderately es- 
timated at $8,000,000,000. In addition to 
which the Government spent $800,000,000, 
mainly in war expenses, and large outlays 
were made by States, whilst the property de- 
stroyed is beyond computation." (Encyclo- 
pedia of United States History). "This esti- 
mate, Doctor Deering, is not heavy enough, 
because it included an estimate of only $1,500,- 
000,000 for pensions. The official figures, 
which I furnish, show that the pensions 
aggregated almost twice that sum." If, then, 



Lee and His Cause 159 

we may trust this experienced and very pains- 
taking official in Washington, and if we add 
his pension figures, we have the justly esti- 
mated cost of our ''late unpleasantness" — 

NINE AND A HALF BILLIONS. Now, sinCC 

nobody can comprehend such a sum — let it 
pass ! The money is gone anyway ! 

In the area that it overspread, in the popu- 
lations it embraced, in the men it enlisted, in 
the money it cost, in the battles that w^ere 
fought, in the lives that it sacrificed, in the 
questions that it settled, in the problems that it 
created, in the burdens that it imposed upon 
the black man, in the emancipation that it 
brought to the Southern white people, in the 
misery and poverty into which it plunged mil- 
lions, in. the wealth that it bestowed upon a 
favored few, in the antagonisms that it left 
for us and our children, it has earned a title to 
its greatness that will never be disputed while 
sun and moon endure! A single item of its 
expense remains and recurs, from year to year, 
as a reminder of what no man can ever fully 
understand, namely $145,937,000 — the pres- 
ent yearly outlay for pensions, of one side 
only, and that after forty-two years have 
passed away. The total expenditure for pen- 



i6o Lee and His Cause 

sions alone has reached the enormous sum 
of $3,545,377,806.60, and no seer can see 
the end ! This sum is more by $258,527,243.60 
than was the cost of both the Army and 
Navy during the whole conflict. Yet legis- 
lation in this direction seems scarce be- 
gun. There were added to the rolls of pen- 
sioners last year — 34,974 names; and this 
year, under the ''Service Pension Law," just 
enacted, it is estimated that 100,000 more 
people will be cared for by "the best Govern- 
ment that the world ever saw." The Govern- 
ment's estimate of this increase annually is 
$10,414,400. 

There are now, forty-two years after the 
war's close, 666,345 soldier's names on the pen- 
sion rolls. This is a longer line than the South 
had in all the years of the war. If the United 
States had bought and set free all the slaves on 
the American continent, and in Africa, and the 
islands of the sea, and had never shot a gun, or 
dug a grave, or builded a prison, or broken a 
heart, or pillaged a city, or burned a home, or 
laid waste an acre, how tremendous the saving 
would have been ! Think ! The estimated value, 
at the outbreak of the war, of all the slaves held 
in all our territory was only $2,000,000,000, 



Lee and His Cause i6i 

and to free them, without law, we came out of 
the struggle with a debt, on August 31st, 1865, 
according to the Government bookkeeper's re- 
port, of $2,845,907,626.56 — ^so that, it is clear, 
we might have bought and freed every slave, 
paid the bill in cash, and had left a balance of 
$845,907,626.56. That would have been a 
mountain of money, not to speak of the brains, 
blood, hearts, homes, lives, labors, energies, 
materials, and everything else saved! Verily, 
the war wasn't a very economical transaction ! 
One general, who commanded in one march, 
through two or three States, confessed that, 
his spoils and conflagrations "amounted to 
$100,000,000. Of this, $20,000,000 inured 
to our benefit, and the rest was mere waste and 
destruction" — so said Sherman. That was in 
Georgia and the Carolinas. Poor Virginia, 
Mother of States and of Statesmen, no man 
has ever had the courage to count up thy costs. 
In one of thy valleys, seventy mills full of 
grain, with 2,000 barns containing farming 
implements, were fired to furnish light for the 
retreating invaders ! It is no wonder that the 
cruel commander could report to his superior, 
''The next crow that Hies over the Valley must 
carry his own rations." The marvel is that, 



1 62 Lee and His Cause 

any American commander could be so savage, 
so utterly heartless, as to authorize such de- 
struction ! That Sherman left a swath of 
blight and fire, and ruins and bones, from forty 
to sixty miles wide, and reaching through three 
broad commonwealths makes us marvel at 
man's inhumanity to man! In its wicked and 
awful rage, Sherman's army was more cruel 
than fire, or famine or plague — for fire spared 
people; famine spared property; plague spared 
both food and property ; that army spared noth- 
ing; it left a desert without an oasis and almost 
without life. And besides Sherman's, there 
were Sheridan's and Hunter's ravages, as fear- 
ful as fire could make them! Enough, the 
story is unbearable! General Bradley John- 
son says, 'The face of the country was so 
changed that one born in it could scarcely 
recognize it." 

It was a wicked and cruel war, yet not 
wholly bad or fought in vain. It had a 
brighter side — the Southern side. Lee's ad- 
dress to his advancing army at Chambersburg, 
Pennsylvania, made the statement that "civili- 
zation and Christianity would not allow re- 
taliation upon enemies. It must be remem- 
bered that we make war only upon armed men, 



Lee and His Cause 163 

and that we cannot take vengeance for the 
wrongs our people have suffered, without 
lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose 
abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of 
our enemies, and offending against Him to 
whom vengeance belongeth, without whose 
favor and support, our efforts must all prove 
in vain." We are given the effect of this 
order by Mr. Charles F. Adams, of Boston, in 
his New York address, January 26th, 1903. 
"In scope and spirit Lee's order was observed, 
and I doubt if a hostile force ever advanced in 
an enemy's country, or fell back from it in re- 
treat, leaving behind it less cause for hate and 
bitterness than did the Army of Northern 
Virginia." Remembering that this gentleman 
was an officer in the army of General Grant, 
we could hardly wish for a better witness. 
But he speaks the bare truth, nothing more. 
A Union citizen who lived in Danville, Ken- 
tucky, when Bragg's army passed through it, 
told me that his soldiers did not take the apples 
ripe in his orchard. It is said that Bragg had 
some soldiers shot for stealing chickens. My 
captain made me return to a prisoner his old 
hat; wouldn't allow the swap; and he once 
ordered me to ride my horse "until he falls," 



164 Lee and His Cause 

rather than "jDress" one on the march to risk 
being captured rather than swap a tired horse 
for a fresh one ! Such was the spirit and dis- 
cipHne of the Southern soldiers. 

And the war had its compensations. It 
wrought in us, and for us, some things that 
nothing else could. It made us a better and a 
greater people; it brought men nearer to God, 
and made women more like Christ; it showed 
human nature at its best, and grace in her 
divinest form. Faith worked by love, and the 
faith we had in God, and Joe Johnston, and 
the Army of Northern Virginia, knew no 
bounds. Hope was never so heavenly. We 
realized the truth — "A man's life consisteth 
not in the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth." We had little to eat, and less to 
drink, and nearly nothing to wear, but what 
we were going to have "when this cruel war 
is over" would have satisfied King Croesus 
himself! Charity never failed us, patience 
had her perfect work; self-denial was glorified 
before our very eyes. The spirit of sympathy 
and helpfulness spread over the land. Every 
man was his ''brother's keeper." Most things 
were done or endured for the public good. 
We "had all things common" — except tea and 



Lee and His Cause 165 

coffee, of which there wasn't enough to be 
divided. Tobacco and toilet soap were about 
the only things a man might not beg, borrow 
or steal. We were at our best and approxi- 
mated the Christ life. We lived and moved 
and had our being for Dixie and Independ- 
ence. The fires of patriotism never burned 
more intensely in Revolutionary times, or on 
Grecian altars. We forgot the fashions, 
threw away useless purses and grew rich in 
noble examples and self-sacrificing deeds. 
We came home worn and weary, hungry and 
ragged, broken in health and bankrupt in 
everything, but we gave the world our Lees 
and Davis, and the mighty "Stonewall," with 
the Hills, and Johnstones, and Helm, and 
Hanson, and Stuart, and Forrest, and 
Morgan, and Breckinridge, and Admiral 
Semmes, and Private Sam Davis, the "Boy 
Martyr" of Tennessee! No money could buy 
these immortal names; no historic doubts can 
blacken them or cause us to forget. The war 
made us a solid South, a self-reliant, self-re- 
specting people. We stand together, and will 
stand in the face of creation, and we feel "the 
satisfaction that proceeds from the conscious- 
ness of duty faithfully performed." For my- 



1 66 Lee and His Cause 

self, I would not barter that for all Kentucky ! 
I have been ashamed of many things in my 
life, but the recollection of my course as a Con- 
federate soldier has been for forty years, my 
chief joy and pride! If ever I was fit to live 
or willing to die, if ever I was worthy of my 
father's name or my mother's blood, if ever I 
was pleased with my place, suited to my rank, 
or satisfied with my sinful self — it must have 
been whilst I was marching under that white- 
starred cross upon that blood-red banner 
against the invaders of my native Southland. 
For that I want no forgiveness in this world 
or the next. I can adopt the saying of my 
great Commander, General Lee : "If all were 
to be done over again, I should act in precisely 
the same manner ; I could have taken no other 
course without dishonor." 



V. 



The greatest friend of Truth is Time : her greatest 
ENEMY IS Prejudice, and her constant companion is 
Humility. — Charles Caleb Colton, "Lacon," 1820, A. D. 

IT WAS A HOPELESS WAR. 

General Lee said to General Pendleton, a 
day or two before the surrender, "I never be- 
lieved that we could, against the gigantic com- 
bination for our subjugation, make good in 
the long run our Independence, unless foreign 
powers should directly or indirectly assist us. 
But such considerations really made with me 
no difference. If all were to be done over 
again, I should act in precisely the same man- 
ner. I could have taken no other course 
without dishonor." 

Comrades, how could 650,000 town-men 
and country boys contend successfully against 
2,987,776 Federal soldiers and sailors — an 
host containing 2,128,304 men more than 
Dixie ever enlisted? Lacking only 12,224, it 
was a mass of 3,000,000 men. Yet it took 



1 68 Lee and His Cause 

more than four and a quarter Yankee soldiers 
four full years to whip each Confederate! It 
was 7,652,335 Southern people against 23, 785,- 
722 Northern, with our 4,000,000 slaves in the 
rear to plot and spy, to deceive, distract and 
devour us. And this estimate must be reduced 
by 3,000,000 Unionists of the Border States. 
It was these things that made us desperate. 
The war was hopeless also for lack of ships, 
and by reason of the blockade that shut out 
every resource from abroad. It was hopeless 
for lack of rail transportation, which let our 
food rot in piles in Georgia, while Lee's 
legions were starving in the trenches in 
Virginia. Our Commander-in-Chief allowed 
himself "but two small rations of meat a 
week." No bread or bacon at Amelia Court 
House compelled the surrender at Appomat- 
tox. It was hopeless for lack of arms. At 
Manassas, a John Brown pike was handed out 
instead of a Mauser rifle. When at McMinn- 
ville, I asked General Morgan for arms, he 
pointed to the Yankee camp and bade me help 
myself. For horse, I rode a sore-back, 
broken-down "plug;" for bridle, I had a halter; 
for saddle, a naked "tree;" for stirrups, a loop 



Lee and His Cause 169 

of rope; and I went into my first fight with a 
single cartridge and some mental reservation. 

It was hopeless through Grant's refusal to 
exchange prisoners; a refusal made through 
General B. F. Butler to General Lee's proposal 
of exchange, 'Svith a view of alleviating the 
sufferings of our soldiers" — made for General 
Grant, to whom, of course, it was submitted — 
a refusal made by the most offensive man and 
in the most offensive form possible, in the 
shape of an argument by Butler to obtain rec- 
ognition of negro equality for some colored 
soldiers captured and confined by the Confed- 
erates. This subject was introduced and 
shrewdly handled with the intention of insult- 
ing the Southern Commander and his soldiers, 
so as to preclude all possibility of an exchange 
of white prisoners. That such was its design, 
Butler confessed before a Congressional com- 
mittee, in his official report, and he testifies 
''that it was for the purpose of carrying out the 
wishes of the Lieutenant-General commanding 
that no prisoners of war should be exchanged." 

Commissioner Ould, after several conferen- 
ces with Butler over the matter, says, "We 
had reached what we both thought a tolerably 
satisfactory basis." But when Grant came the 



170 Lee and His Cause 

next day, he gave Butler "the most emphatic 
verbal directions not to take any step by w^hich 
another able-bodied man should be exchanged 
until further orders from him." In his official 
report, Butler says, "I wrote an argument 
showing our right to our colored soldiers. 
This argument set forth our claims in the most 
offensive form possible, consistently with ordi- 
nary courtesy of language." The scheme suc- 
ceeded. Lee declined to exchange, except 
"upon the basis established by the cartel." This 
never had contained any recognition of runa- 
way slaves as soldiers. 

When afterwards General Lee called on 
President Davis to tell him the result of his at- 
tempt, and had, says Mr. Davis, listened to the 
expression of my bitter disappointment, he 
said — "We have done everything in our power 
to mitigate the suffering of prisoners and there 
is no just cause of further responsibility on our 
part." 

In a dispatch to Butler, Grant tries to justi- 
fy his refusal by saying, "On the subject of 
exchange, I differ from General Hitchcock. It 
is hard on our men held in Southern prisons 
not to exchange them, but it is humanity to 
those left in the ranks, to fight our battles. 



Lee and His Cause 171 

Every man, released on parole or otherwise, 
becomes an active soldier against us at once, 
either directly or indirectly. If we commence 
a system of exchange, which liberates all pris- 
oners taken, wie will have to fight on until the 
whole South is exterminated. If we hold 
those caught, they amount to no more than 
dead men. At this particular time, to release 
all prisoners North would insure Sherman's 
defeat, and would compromise our safety 
here." This humiliating official confession is 
dated, "City Point, August 18, 1864." 

Another effort made by the Confederate 
Government was to obtain the exchange of 
"officer for officer, and man for man," regard- 
less of "the excess" which the cartel contem- 
plated and comprehended. This offer was not 
noticed at all, although it would have turned 
loose every Yankee in our prisons ! The next 
proposal made by the Southern side was to 
send the United States authorities "their sick 
and wounded without requiring any equiva- 
lents." This was but partially carried out, 
because, although attempted in the summer, 
the enemy sent no transportation for their 
poor diseased soldiers until November, when 
our people, unable to move the sick and 



172 Lee and His Cause 

wounded from distant places, "substituted 
5,000 well men." In return, about 3,000 of our 
wounded boys were sent to us, the other 500 
who started having- died on the journey. For 
sound men the enemy would willingly have 
given us those dying ones. 

It should be remembered also that in con- 
sequence of the sickness and suffering among 
the Yankee prisoners, owing to confine- 
ment, climate, scarcity of good food, and 
lack of proper medicines, our Commissioner, 
Mr. Ould, offered to buy with gold, cotton or 
tobacco, the needed drugs from the Federal 
authorities, "at even two or three prices, if 
required," and assured them, that the medicines 
would be used exclusively for the treatment of 
Union prisoners." He also agreed, if it were 
desired, that such remedies might be brought 
to, and distributed among the sufferers by 
United States' surgeons. President Davis 
says, — "Incredible as it may appear, it is nev- 
ertheless, strictly true that no reply was ever 
received to this offer." 

Mercy might well have given up with such 
a repulse, but one more heroic attempt Avias put 
forth. Mr. Davis sent from the prisoners at 
Andersonville a delegation of four men to 



Lee and His Cause 173 

Washington to try if their personal presence 
and pleading could soften the official heart, 
and set the captives free. Mr. Lincoln wouldn't 
even see them, and they returned, as they had 
promised, to confinement. There is in Rich- 
mond, on file, among the papers of the South- 
ern Historical Society, a letter from the wife 
of the chairman of that delegation (he is now 
dead), in which she says that her husband al- 
ways said that "he was more contemptuously 
treated by Secretary of War Stanton, than he 
ever was at Andersonville." 

The refusal of the Federal Government to 
exchange prisoners was at first based upon its 
unwillingness to recognize as a belligerent 
power the Confederate States. In 1861, Gen- 
eral Grant wrote to General Leonidas Polk, 
wiho sought of him an exchange^ — "I recognize 
no 'Southern Confederacy' my self, but will 
communicate with higher authorities for their 
views." These 'Views" agreed with Grant's. 
When on July 2, 1863, Mr. Alexander H. 
Stephens was sent by President Davis on an 
errand of mercy to Washington to treat for 
the release of all prisoners, he was turned back 
from Fortress Monroe, and his Government 
scorned as "insurgent" his request was declared 



174 Lee and His Cause 

"inadmissible." A "mission of simple human- 
ity" inadmissible ! Tell it not in Gath ! 

"When "the excess" of captives was in Con- 
federate hands exchanges and paroles were 
mutual and easy. The trouble began when the 
tide turned, and the surrenders at Donaldson 
and Vicksburg had given the excess to the 
Northern side. To have exchanged them then 
would have strengthened us the most. 

Toward the end of the struggle, all excuses 
and pretenses were boldly cast away and the 
policy of destroying us by ''depletion'' (Grant's 
word) openly admitted. All Southern prison- 
ers must be held and starved and shot to death ; 
this land must be laid waste, its stores and 
crops consumed, its homes robbed and burned, 
its people, old and young, driven into the 
woods, its flocks and herds devoured or car- 
ried off, and even its farming implements and 
granaries given to the flames, so that the com- 
ing years must be years of famine to such as 
might outlive the battle and hospital and prison 
and deportation! We had had "war to the 
knife, and knife to the hilt," as among savages, 
but it was too merciful! War must hence- 
forth be waged against helpless captives, inno- 
cent children and our defenseless women. 



Lee and His Cause 175 

Their food and shelter and all that might make 
life tolerable must be taken away! In three 
pregnant sentences Major-General B. F. But- 
ler avows the poHcy and fastens the responsi- 
bility of it on the Federal Government. He 
writes : 

"I have felt it my duty to give an account 
with this particular carefulness of my parti- 
cipation in the business of exchange of pris- 
oners, the orders under which I acted, and the 
negotiations attempted, which comprise a 
faithful narration of all that was done, so that 
all may become a matter of history. The great 
importance of the questions; the fearful re- 
sponsibility for the many thousands of lives 
which, by the refusal to exchange, were sac- 
rificed by the most cruel forms of death, from 
cold, starvation, and pestilence of the prison 
pens in Raleigh and Andersonville, being more 
than all the British soldiers killed in the 
wars of Napoleon; the anxiety of fathers, 
brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, to know the 
exigency which caused this terrible, and per- 
haps, as it may seem to them, useless and un- 
necessary destruction of those dear to them, 
by horrible deaths, each and all have com- 
pelled me to this exposition, so that it may be 



176 Lee and His Cause 

seen that those Hves were spent as a part of the 
system of attack upon the rebelHon, devised by 
the vv^isdom of the General-in-Chief of the 
armies, to destroy it by depletion, depending 
upon our superior numbers to win the victory 
at last. The loyal mourners will doubtless de- 
rive solace from this fact, and appreciate all 
the more highly the genius which conceived 
the plan, and the success won at so great a 
cost." The "loyal mourners" will never for- 
give General Grant, in my opinion. 

No wonder that poor Wirz was hung! 
Somebody had to die ! A scape-goat was never 
needed more. Unhappy Soul ! to be the vica- 
rious victim of one's friends would be hard 
enough, but to have to die for the sins of one's 
enemies — who can describe that anguish? Of 
this judicial murder, Alexander H. Stephens, 
Vice-President, says : — *'The efforts which 
have been so industriously made to fix the 
odium of cruelty and barbarity on Mr. Davis 
and other high officials under the Confederate 
Government, in the matter of prisoners, in the 
face of all the facts, constitute one of the blood- 
iest attempted outrages upon the truth of his- 
tory which has been essayed; not less than the 
infamous attempt to fix upon him and other 



Lee and His Cause 177 

high officials on the Confederate side, the 
guih of Mr. Lincoln's assassination. What- 
ever unnecessary privations and sufferings 
prisoners on both sides were subjected to, the 
responsibility rested not upon Mr. Davis or 
the Confederate authorities. It was the fault 
of the Federal authorities in not agreeing to 
and carrying out an immediate exchange, 
which Mr. Davis was at all times anxious to 
do. The men at the head of affairs at Wash- 
ington were solely responsible for all these 
sufferings. Neither Libby nor Belle Isle, nor 
Salisbury nor Andersonville, would have had 
a groaning prisoner of war but for the refusal 
of the Federal authorities to comply with the 
earnest desire of the Richmond Government for 
an immediate exchange upon the most liberal 
and humane principles." 

As to the treatment of prisoners in our 
hands, Mr. Stephens is just as clear and 
strong. He declares that they shared equally 
with the Confederate soldiers whatever there 
was to be had. I myself happen to know that 
in Georgia the produce of "the tax in kind" 
stored in Government warehouses was divided 
into equal parts, and one part sent to the Con- 
federate soldiers and the other part to the 



178 Lee and His Cause 

Yankee prisoner, at Andersonville. They had 
what we had — share and share ahke. When 
told by his Commissary General that the sup- 
plies were so short that rations for either the 
Confederate soldier or Yankee prisoners must 
be reduced; Lee said, "While I have no au- 
thority in the case, my desire is that the pris- 
oners shall have equal rations with my men." 
There is, however, no use to quote any man, 
when we have official returns of the United 
States Surgeon General Barnes showing that 
a much greater number of Confederates died 
in Northern prisons than of Federals in South- 
ern stockades; and this in spite of the fact 
that we held 50,000 more Federals in captivity 
than the Yankee had of our soldiers. In 
round numbers they had only 220,000 Confed- 
erates; we held 270,000 Federals. Of these 
only 22,^y6 died on our hands; whilst, of the 
220,000 men held in Northern prisons, 26,436 
died. In other words, with about 50,000 more 
prisoners to feed and guard we had a loss of 
nearly 4,000 less than the Union people lost 
of our men." "The per cent, of Federal deaths 
was under nine in Southern prisons : the per 
cent, of Confederate deaths in Yankee prisons 
was over twelve!' And that, too with the mar- 



Lee and His Cause 179 

kets of the world open to them for all needed 
supplies, and their bank-vaults full to overflow- 
ing with gold and greenbacks with which to 
purchase! Query; If in our poverty, we 
saved three per cent, more lives than they, what 
per cent, might they have saved through their 
wealth, if they had been willing? 

Repeated efforts have been made to disprove, 
or somehow dispose of, these official figures of 
Surgeon General Barnes. They are so con- 
vincing and cruelly condemnatory that they can- 
not be endured. Unfortunately for our friends, 
the enemy, their shame and the attempt to hide 
it came all too late. The report of Dr. Barnes 
is quoted by Vice-President A. H. Stevens, in 
his great volume — '^The War Between the 
States." And it has editorial mention in ''The 
National Intelligencer" of Washington, June 2, 
1869. No such report can now be found! 
Nor is any knowledge of its existence admitted 
by any Department of the Government. Its 
disappearance is a mystery, but one not so hard 
to explain as the frequent reference to it by 
Southern orators who couldn't have seen what 
never existed. And the failure of Northern 
speakers and writers to deny its damaging 



i8o Lee and His Cause 

showing" for many years is even more a mys- 
tery. When Ben Hill quoted it in 1876 in 
U. S. Senate, why was it not questioned? 
Whyf 

The war was hopeless for want of revenue, 
credit and a sound currency ; for want of mines 
and manufactories ; for lack of sailors and ships 
of war with which to keep open our ports and 
closed our river-g-ates, and for lack of almost 
all that enters intO' the business of aggressive 
warfare. It was hopeless for want of ma- 
terials, of skilled mechanics, suitable shops, 
blankets, clothing, shoes, medicines, salt, lead, 
iron, copper, leather, sulphur, saltpetre and 
anesthetics. I have seen trains loaded with 
ammunition and soldiers stopped for want of 
axle grease. We fought hunger and sickness, 
cold and nakedness. On the Rapidan, Lee had 
a thousand men without a blanket and 3,000 
hatless, barefooted fellows in the snow at one 
time; but we tightened our belts, gritted our 
teeth, and held on to hope. The last charge 
at Appomattox was as gallant as the first at 
Manastsas. We had pride and patriotism to 
spare, but we couldn't feed the living, or raise 
again our dead ! — And so, -cc;^ failed! We sank 
in sorrow and sheer exhaustion, but not in 



Lee and His Cause i8i 

shame. General Stephen D. Lee says: "We 
fought until about half of our enlisted strength 
was under the sod." And this enlisted strength 
was not near so great as many have imagined. 
Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of 
War, says, in the American Cyclopedia (1875) 
"The Adjutant-General S. Cooper of C. S. 
Army estimates the entire available Confeder- 
ate forces capable of active services in the field 
Was 600,000 men, and not more than 400,000 
were enrolled at any one time. The Confed- 
erate States never had in the field at once more 
than 200,000 men." (See Volume V, page 
232. ) Here we rest our Cause ! 

Boys, you loved it well, and stood by it to 
the end ! God bless you for it ! You will re- 
ceive to-night, from the fair hands of Our 
Confederate Women, the bronze CROSS OF 
HONOR. It will perish, but not the sweet sat- 
isfaction of having done your duty, nor the 
blessed consciousness of having been in the 
right! Good-night, Comrades, Good-night! 



"Heroic deeds are deathless ; and they live 
Unmarked whilst Empires crumble into dust, 

They master fame, and life and glory give 
To storied urn and animated bust." 



SOURCES 

"General Lee, by Fitzhngh Lee," his nephew 
and cavalry commander. 

"Robert E. Lee and the Southern Confed- 
eracy, by Henry A. White, M. A., D. D., 
Ph. D." 

"Recollections and Letters of R. E. Lee, by 
Robert E. Lee, Jr." 

"Personal Reminiscences of General R. E. 
Lee, by Rev. Dr. J. Wm. Jones, Chaplain A. 
N. Va." 

"Genesis of the Civil War, by Major-General 
S. W. Crawford, U. S. A." 

"Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern- 
ment, by Jefferson Davis." 

"Is Davis a Traitor? by Albert Taylor Bled- 
soe, A. M., LL. D., late a Professor of the 
University of Virginia." 

"The Southern States of the American 
Union, by J. L. M. Curry, LL. D., etc." 

"A View of the Constitution of the United 
States of America, by Wm. Rawle, LL. D., 
Philadelphia, 1825." 



Lee and His Cause 183 

"The True History of the Civil War, by Guy 
Carleton Lee, Ph. D., of the Johns Hopkins 
University.-' 

"Service Afloat, by Admiral Raphael 
Semmes, of the Confederate States Navy." 

"A School History of the United States, by 
Susan Pendleton Lee." 

''Confederate Veteran, Official Organ of the 
U. C. V. ; Sons of U. C. V. ; Daughters of the 
Confederacy; by S. A. Cunningham, late of 
Army of Tennessee," Nashville, Tenn., A. D. 
1 892- 1 907. This able, beautiful and invaluable 
magazine may be seen in ten thousand Southern 
homes, where it enjoys the preference and 
deserves the honor of all Dixie's defenders over 
its periodical rivals. The first of its class, and 
the best! 



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